Explosions terrify two Rocky Boy women

Elizabeth Doney Havre Daily News [email protected]

Rocky Boy A miracle. That's what Rocky Boy resident Glenn Eagleman said saved his two girls' lives after a propane line explosion tore through their house on April 26. The explosion left only the living room portion of the home partly intact the part of the home where they were sitting on separate couches. Theresa Small, 28, and Celecia Eagleman, 16, were watching television, doing laundry and talking on the phone when their house went deadly silent. “A moment before the explosion, the air got really quiet like everything went on mute,” Small said. “Then I noticed that the air was heavy and I looked over at Celecia to ask her if she felt it, too, but I didn't even get a chance. Then there was a big boom and I woke up with a coffee table on me and heard my dad calling my name.” Small said she began crawling towards where she knew the front door should be, but the floor was all crooked and “tilted in crazy ways” with debris all over. She said she remembers thinking, “We have to get out of here.” The glass in the front window had shattered out, the entire house had lifted off the foundation and turned about 8 inches clockwise with insulation spreading far out on the “Haystack” hills. The entire metal front door blew completely off it's hinges. If either of them had decided to go to their rooms, they would have been ripped to shreds just like the walls and insides of those rooms. Luckily, they were both in the only part of the house that could have kept them alive. Glenn Eagleman was working about a thousand feet away from the house on a pick-up, when he heard the sound barrier break and looked up, expecting to see a jet. Instead he saw his house in shambles, with the sick realization that his girls were inside that house. He ran to the house to see his niece Celecia Eagleman standing dazed at the doorway with blood trinkling down her lip. He helped her away from the house, while calling for his daughter, Theresa Small. Small, who was also bleeding from the mouth, started crawling to his voice and Eagleman helped her out through the winDow which the glass had shattered out of seconds before. Both women suffered mild concussions with numerous bruises and minor back injuries but were denied urgent care access at the Rocky Boy Health Center, which was closed by the time they arrived there at 4:30 p. m. “They just opened a month ago and it's supposed to be urgent care, which is what their big sign says outside their new building,” Glenn Eagleman said. “What's urgent about it? They turned us away in a life or death situation.” He said after receiving no help at the Indian Health Service, he raced the girls to the meat market where he called 911 and the on-call EMT's Larry Bernard, Melissa Swan, Bonnie Dixen and Henry Sutherland, Jr. Arrived about 20 minutes later to escort them via ambulance to the Northern Montana Hospital in Havre. “I was really scared and jumpy, there was pain in the back of my head and a lot of pain in my back,” Small said of her injuries. “It was a very scary feeling, even for me,” Glenn Eagleman said. “I didn't expect to find them alive when I looked up and saw my house shredded apart. They were both bleeding and Celecia kept saying she couldn't breathe.” The Red Cross of Havre put the family up for the weekend at the Town House Inn, while they tried to work out living arrangments with the Chippewa Cree Housing Department and relatives. The family went to stay with Glenn Eagleman's mother a few miles away from his own home. The incident is being investigated by the Rocky Boy criminal investigator Grace Her Many Horses, who expects to give a report out by Tuesday and the state fire marshall, who is also still investigating the scene. Glenn Eagleman was invited to an emergency housing meeting called by Chipppewa Cree Tribal Council to attend to the matter of the explosion, the faulty propane line and sewage ground seepage. The seepage is believed to have caused a second e x p l o s i o n when the hot water heater ignited a normal procedure to light the p r o p a n e tank, which heats the w a t e r . Instead, the ignitor light the propane gas that was a heavy, thick and invisible cloud inside the home, seeping out of a broken line underneath the modular home. The home was purchased with 22 other homes out of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada through HUD funding. The family moved into the modular in May of 1999 on a scattered homesite location just outside the agency. They experienced problems with groundwater, which Glenn Eagleman believes led to the explosion. “What happened was every spring, my crawl space would get filled with water every time it rained,” he said. “Housing hired a private contractor to complete a foundation drain with perforated pipe along the back wall of the house and pumped it through a pipe in the coulee. That design was supposed to take the water from the crawl space, but it never worked because the contractor Ken Blatt of Arrow Construction stated that when they dug the pipe they also dug up two natural springs and water just started gushing up from the ground. The water had a hard time seeping into the ground because it was a high groundwater area. My backyard was constantly water logged because there was already so much water under the ground. After the first time, we could smell a sewer smell, which was really methane gas.” Glenn Eagleman said he believes that doing laundry shook the pipe until it broke, which spilled raw sewage into the crawl space. That in turn had eventually converted to methane gas with invisible vapors. “I knew one of the explosions was from that methane gas. When you first walked into the house, that day especially, you could really smell it. That smell was so strong it was just burning my nose. I kept thinking, why were there two explosions?” he said. “My daughter had every window open in the house the day of the explosion to air out the smell. In the back of my mind I kept thinking about that methane gas that was there. “The methane gas outside and below the house exploded seconds after the propane line seepage lit up when the propane water heater thermostat kicked in to reheat the water,” Eagleman explained. An insurance adjuster for the Housing Department was out at the scene Thursday and will determine the amount of insurance money the home will be entitled to for replacement, as the house was insured. The family will get money to rebuild through housing, hopefully within the next few months, but the new house will not be complete for at least a year, according to the housing director Susie Hay. “It's a miracle these girls are alive and here today,” Glenn Eagleman stated. “I'm thankful for that. I just feel so sorry for these girls they are just tramautized.” All the family's possessions were destroyed, including precious photos of Small's late brother who was killed in a tragic car accident just before they moved into the house. The community along with the housing department had a fund raiser dinner to help the family with expenses. Glenn Eagleman is a tribal game warden and his supervisor gave him paid leave while he and his girls took time to get housing, clothing, medical attention and counseling situated. “I don't feel safe anywhere,” Celecia Eagleman said of her post-tramautic stress indicators. Both the women experience nightmares and are still shook up over the incident, Glenn Eagleman said. “I don't like leaving them for too long because I know that they need my security,” he said. “I do my best to reassure them that what happened was a rare thing and try to make them feel at ease. They are wary now. They are constantly on guard even a door slamming makes them jump.”