ST. CLOUD — Tom Neal has been retired from the St. Cloud Fire Department for 20 years.
"I retired in 2003 and now I'm living a life of leisure," Neal said. "I golfed three or four times a week for a while but then both of my hips had to be operated on. So, no golfing lately."
Today, Neal, 75, lives in New Munich with his wife, Robin, but he has kept many reminders of St. Cloud firefighting days.
There is one piece is Neal's memorabilia that still makes him shake his head. It's the helmet he was wearing the afternoon of Friday, Dec. 11, 1998, when he walked across the street from St. Cloud's downtown fire station to investigate a gas leak on First Street North.
"It was a normal day. A warm day in December. I was going through the morning routine and then we got the call about the smell of gas by the courthouse," Neal said. "That was just the start.
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"It didn't end up being a normal day."
Neal and the St. Cloud Fire Department were on the scene after getting a complaint about the smell of gas from the maintenance staff at the Stearns County Courthouse .
Once on the scene, the firefighters discovered that a crew from Cable Contractors Inc. was attempting to install a utility pole anchor on the south side of First Street North, but had ruptured a gas pipeline in the process.
The Cable Contractors crew began to smell gas while dirt blew out of the hole immediately after the rupture. The crew's foreman called his supervisor and the area was blocked off. The St. Cloud Fire Department was a block away, but wasn't immediately notified of the issue.
The stage was set for a deadly explosion that killed four people and injured 11. Downtown St. Cloud was changed on that day 25 years ago, and so were those who lived through the incident.
Calling it in
Lisa and Ralph Braegelmann remember the day vividly. Ralph, the building and facilities director at the Stearns County Courthouse, got a call from Lisa, his co-worker and future wife, about a gas smell.
"I was a buyer at the time, in purchasing, so I bought supplies for the county like computers and office supplies," Lisa said. "Ralph could smell it, too, when he came down to the loading dock. He told me not to go into the loading dock and shut the door. He left to investigate it."
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Ralph walked down to talk to the cable and power employees, who said that a supervisor was called. That wasn't good enough for Braegelmann.
"When they told me they had only called their boss, I immediately called it in (to the sheriff's office). The smell of gas was in the air, which is never a good thing," Ralph said. "We ran the license plate numbers and got everybody to move their cars out of there. After that was done, I told one of the (Northern States Power Co.) guys that they didn't my help anymore."
Cable Contractors Inc. was hired by a Northern States Power subsidiary, Seren Innovations Inc.
Explosion hits
After the line was struck, according to the accident report from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) , the gas began to make its way through Bellantti's Pizza & Deli and into the basement of the building. The accident reported that gas collected in the walls of the Bellantti's basement that were made of "stacked stones and crumbling mortar."
All it needed was a spark to cause disaster.
At 11:29 a.m., that spark happened. According to the NTSB's report, a gas water heater in the Bellantti's basement is believed to have been the ignition source.
The explosion ripped through Bellantti's and destroyed the buildings containing Book Em's Bar, Tom's Bar, Bartsh Bail Bonds and the two buildings containing the Hall Law Offices.
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Tom Neal and Ralph Braegelmann were right there when the explosion happened. Both of them count themselves lucky to be alive.
Neal was standing across the street "maybe 5 feet from where they dug the hole." The explosion knocked him off his feet and into the middle of the street.
"This was a routine call for us. We had already had 20 of them that month, I remember that," Neal said. "I had a screen door land on top of me. I just remember thinking 'This is bad and this isn't the way I want to go.' I remember bricks flying by me.
"The blast went in the other direction, that's why I'm still here. If it had gone the other way, a lot more people could have died. The blast broke every rafter in Howie's (Sports Bar) across the street. That's how powerful it was. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, otherwise that could have been it for me."
The helmet
Neal's fire helmet was almost cut in half from the blast. He still has it at his home in New Munich and it serves as a reminder of how lucky he feels to be alive. Neal, a Sauk Centre native, was taken to St. Cloud Hospital shortly after the blast after his left hand was cut badly during the explosion. He needed 26 stitches to get the gash on the hand to stop bleeding.
"I was bleeding pretty good and I was losing a lot of blood after," Neal said. "When I retired, they let me keep the helmet. It looked like I was hit by a truck. If I hadn't been wearing that thing, I wouldn't be talking to you today.
"I just wanted to make sure all of my guys were OK. A lawyer from (Hall Law) told us he had people on the second floor in the building. We got them out, including a pregnant woman who was pinned against her desk. We got her out within 30 minutes."
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After getting stitched up, Neal later returned to work that night, which his wife, Robin, wasn't very happy about. Robin, who was a paraprofessional at South Junior High, happened to be on a field trip at Crossroads Center at the time of the explosion. She made her way to the hospital, but had to wait a long time before she could see Neal.
"I had to go to the chapel and wait for any news on Tom," Robin Neal said. "I was the last one in there and nobody would tell me anything. I was just in a panic. Finally, I spoke to someone and asked to get info about Tom. They told me he was getting stitched up and I could go back and see him.
"He wanted to go back to work — and did. I didn't want him to. I'm pretty sure he had a slight concussion."
A 'slow motion' experience
Ralph Braegelmann was blown into the air and collided with the west wall of the courthouse as the explosion happened.
He hit the building on his right side and an object also left a gash in the back of his head that required 12 stitches to patch up. Neal confirmed from a Dec. 12 St. Paul Pioneer Press article that his brown leather jacket was filled with tear marks and he also had a baseball-sized bruise on his right thigh.
After hitting the building, Braegelmann stumbled around the corner, lay down on the sidewalk and waited for emergency personnel to arrive. He was taken by ambulance to St. Cloud Hospital where he was treated and released the same day.
"I could have been dead 25 years already," he said in a phone call from his Sun City, Arizona, winter home. "I know I was fortunate. Everything happened in slow motion. I just count my blessings. If people had been in Bellantti's for lunch that day, it could have been a lot worse."
Those lost in the blast
Then-Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and Lt. Gov. Joanne Benson, a St. Cloud native, toured the scene later that afternoon. Carlson called the explosion "an enormous tragedy."
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After the blast, rescue workers found four people who were killed by debris or the blast itself. Eleven others — including Tom Neal and Ralph Braegelmann — were taken to St. Cloud Hospital for injuries.
Killed in the incident were:
- Delbert Rose, 68, was a decorated war hero and Lakeville native who lived above Bellantti's. He was blown from his second-floor apartment and landed in the basement of the building. According to a Dec. 13, 1998, Pioneer Press article, Rose had moved to St. Cloud from Farmington a year earlier to be near the Veterans Administration Medical Center, where he received treatment for various ailments. Rose had been injured during the Korean War after an explosion sent him flying out of a machine-gunner nest. He had received the Purple Heart and several other military awards for his service in that war for the U.S. Army. He had celebrated his 68th birthday on Pearl Harbor Day just four days earlier on Dec. 7.
- Carolyn Traeger Sandquist, 50, was standing in the parking lot of the nearby Taco John's at the time of the blast. The St. Cloud resident had been a clerk at the downtown post office for 13 years. Sandquist left behind her husband, Thomas.
- Karl Klang, 53, of Cold Spring, had been a gas locator for NSP for only two months at the time of the explosion. A grandfather, Klang left behind a wife and two adult daughters.
- Bob Jacobs, 46, of St. Cloud, was a gas technician specialist for NSP for more than 15 years. He left behind a wife, Jean, and two teenage children at the time.
Both Jacobs and Klang were helping to evacuate the area that morning after getting the phone call from the cable crew.
"I had talked to one of the NSP guys who died right before it happened. He was crushed underneath the rubble," Braegelmann said with a long pause. "The last thing he heard someone say was me telling him I was going to lunch and that he had it covered.
"It's hard not to think about that sometimes."
Lawsuits and property damage
Several blocks were shut down for weeks after the explosion and several buildings along the 800 and 900 blocks of St. Germain Street had shattered windows. The damage or lack of electricity also canceled Christmas shows at downtown theaters.
In its report released in July 2000, the NTSB determined that the probable cause of the accident was the lack of adequate procedures by Cable Contractors Inc. employees to prevent damage to nearby utilities when its anchor installation crews encountered unusual conditions such as striking an underground obstacle. Contributing to the severity of the accident was the delay by Cable Contractors workers to properly notify the authorities.
The NTSB also determined that the St. Cloud Fire Department responded quickly to the scene, but that the firefighters didn't fully address "the risk to people and property posed by the leak or reduce the consequences of a possible fire or explosion." The department has since developed guidelines for responding to natural gas emergencies.
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Six cases, including three wrongful death lawsuits, were settled out of court between the victims' families and NSP (which is now known as Xcel Energy), Seren Innovations, CCI and Sirti Limited in early 2004. The settlements were reached just days before the cases were set to go to trial. Details of the settlements remained confidential.
In its accident report about the explosion, the NTSB said that $399,000 in property damage was caused to the Stearns County Courthouse, Taco John's and Howie's Sports Bar, which was closed for sixth months after for repairs. Taco John's has since become Taco Villa. Braegelmann said that the damage to the courthouse was mostly done to the exterior of the west wall.
After demolishing the buildings affected by the blast, the land sat vacant for many years. In 2007, Stearns County purchased the site for $400,000 and turned it into a parking lot.
Dec. 11, 1998, timeline
- Approximately 10:15 a.m. — the Seren Innovations work crew punctures the underground gas pipeline.
- Approximately 10:51 a.m. — the Seren Innovations foreman contacts his supervisor to report the leak.
- 11:05 a.m. — Ralph Braegelmann, the facilities director of the Stearns County Courthouse, places a call to the Stearns County chief deputy sheriff after investigating the gas smell and being told by Seren Innovations workers that the leak had occurred.
- 11:06 a.m. — St. Cloud Fire Department is dispatched to the scene. St. Cloud police units are assigned to crowd control at the site.
- 11:16 a.m. — Two Northern States Power trucks arrive.
- 11:29 a.m. — An unknown source ignites the gas in the basement of Bellantti's Pizza and Deli, causing the explosion.
Source: NTSB's Pipeline Accident Report from July 11, 2000
The Trust Project
