Gas Explosion in North Bend

25 April 2014

The (former) Pizza Place, center, Last Cuts East barber shop, left, and the remains of a small strip mall

C.J. and I were awakened at about 0330 by an enormous blast that shook the whole house. C.J. was thinking "explosion" while I was stuck on "earthquake". A quick walk through the house showed a few teddy bears dislodged from the west-facing window sill and a framed needlepoint fallen off the wall. I was looking toward Mt. Si and trying to see if there had been a landslide. After determining that a tree had not fallen on the house we went back to bed to the accompaniment of distant sirens and, C.J. said, helicopters.

In the morning C.J. found out from our neighbor that what we had heard and felt had been the result of an explosion in the old Pizza Place which had been closed for a few years and was being renovated. It is about  third of a mile from our house. Midmorning we walked over there to see what the area looked like. Almost the whole QFC parking lot was cordoned off with "police line" tape and covered with chunks of insulation and building parts. The main street, North Bend Way, was closed just east of the post office all the way to the new roundabout to provide access for the fire and rescue trucks. [Only two people had injuries as a result of the flying debris, a remarkably minor number of victims for such a huge explosion.] The Pizza Place was totally gone with no sign of fire, but the barber shop, once, long ago, a Triple XXX Root Beer Drive-in, was burned rather than blown up. Part of the strip mall was still standing but leaning away from the obvious blast center. On the opposite side of North Bend Way (south) the apartment buildings showed broken sliding glass doors and the plywood siding blown out in places. We didn't walk down as far as the Red Oak nursing home (where the two injuries occurred) or to Les Schwab tires but later saw photos of the destruction of the big overhead doors at Les Schwab. Around 1500 I returned while on an errand to the post office and also looked at the apartment building where Dan Heath used to live. Almost all of the garage doors facing the blast were taped with red X's or had been replaced by sheets of particle board. Tracked construction machinery was just beginning to dig through the rubble, and the QFC parking lot was open again as a street sweeper cleaned it up.

Same area from a different angle

Closer view of the barber shop