Fire storm in the dead of night...

Jeremy Brandon lives a mile from me and about a mile from the site of the unexplained pipeline explosion that occurred around two miles east of Alex just before 3:00 am, early Friday morning, 11-14-08. An Oklahoman article about the incident is included below. Jeremy reported hearing the massive explosion at 2:57 am. I did not hear an explosion but was awakened at 2:59 am by my dog Dexter who was barking furiously at the incredible rushing sound filling the air. Jeremy provided a video account of the incident to the Oklahoman:


Looking out my east door, I was unable to see what Jeremy saw. However, peering over the church across the street, I could see a bright, flickering glow in the sky that appeared to be directly over my parents' home a mile away. The sound coming from the area was not unfamiliar around here. It seemed a supercharged version of what happens when a natural gas well is "vented." This occurs when excess gas is burned off at the well head, sending up a fiercely hot column of fire that can be seen for miles and may burn around the clock for days. Still, the sound I heard was so very fierce and encompassing, I immediately decided that it was not the result of a well being inexplicably vented in the middle of the night. I believed a large plane had crashed very near my house and had caused a huge fire.

I called my parents just after 3:00 am. They had not heard the explosion nor the sucking sounds coming from the site and were in no immediate danger. My dad took a look out the door and decided that perhaps a natural gas well was being vented after all or that a well three-quarters of a mile away had "blown out." We had no idea what had really happened.

The emergency responders who began to arrive a half hour after we first saw the fireball found neither a plane crash nor a blown out well. Natural gas was indeed venting, but in a much more concerning manner. A 20-inch natural gas transporter pipeline buried eight feet under the ground had somehow caught fire, exploding from under the ground to create a crater 30 feet across and incinerating the rock house and mobile home around 50 yards from the buried pipe. I saw them the evening after the blast. The homes were almost vaporized as if struck by a strategically placed bomb. The heat was so intense that the house across the road was also burned to the ground.

My mom and dad's good friends, Al and Venita Parker, live less than a mile from my parents and not much over 100 yards from where the explosion occurred. They were knocked out of bed and feared for their lives. Other than experiencing some serious heat, they survived the incident and had no damage.

The following are video accounts of this strange incident. Oklahoma is heavily criss-crossed with natural gas pipelines, which are not supposed to just blow up and so there is much speculation as to the cause of the explosion. Obviously the pipe had a leak, otherwise no gas could have escaped to fuel the blast. Al suspects that a grass fire started and caused the explosion when it finally reached the leak on the pipeline run. I thought of how seismically active that area is and wondered if a small tremor had occurred as it so often does, causing rocks to send off small sparks that allowed the gas to ignite underground. They say we will know within a week what likely occurred. Nothing will change the fact that myself and most other Alex residents awoke to an incredible fire storm in the middle of the night.