Family sifts through remains of exploded house; propane leak suspected

The blasted-out husk that had been Isaac Wittenborn’s basement just a day before still was smoldering.

Near it, from a splintered pile of timber and bricks, his sister-in-law plucked a still-sealed tub of Crisco and held it aloft.

“Stuff like that survives?” Wittenborn muttered, stuffing his hands in his pockets. “Stuff we could just go and replace at the store?”

His eyes looked as though he’d been crying, or was about to, as he looked over the wreckage after his family’s home north of Marble Hill, Missouri, exploded about 8:30 p.m. Saturday after an apparent propane leak filled the house with gas.

Nobody was hurt. Wittenborn, his wife and his two young daughters had been out of town. But the roughly 1,200-square-foot home was gone. What wasn’t burned or broken was hanging in trees around the wooded yard.

Debris from Isaac Wittenborn's house landed in a tree after it exploded Saturday night.Tyler Graef

Wittenborn’s father-in-law, Brad Brock, wondered aloud how they’d ever get all the soggy fiberglass insulation out of the trees, most of which were 40 feet tall or higher.

“These trees look like they’ve had Christmas ornaments put up in ‘em,” he said.

“If you look there, to where the front of the house is there,” he said, pointing first at the yard, then across the street. “There’s the front door.”

Sure enough, what had been the storm door was now crumpled over the barbed-wire fence on the far side of Bollinger County Road 852.

“The fire department said that it was a gas leak in one of the old pipes, but there’s not enough left to figure out really what happened,” Wittenborn said. “I guess it got cold last night. Furnace kicked on, and it just exploded.”

He said he’s still in disbelief.

“When we got the call, we thought it was a joke,” he said.

“Houses don’t just blow up.”

The Wittenborns had lived there for about five years but were in the process of moving to a larger property near Brock’s home.

“It wasn’t stuff we had to have. All our essentials were out already,” Wittenborn said. “But all our girls’ keepsakes; all our history.”

Hand-knitted afghans, photographs, several thousand dollars’ worth of Wittenborn’s Magic, the Gathering playing-card collection — all gone.

But if fortune seemed to have scorned them, it had graced them in equal measure.

After attending a wedding in Illinois, the family had intended to try and move more things to the new home Saturday, but they had decided at the last minute it could wait until Sunday morning.

Wittenborn, who keeps pigeons on the back of the property, said he would have gone to feed the birds while his wife and daughters would have entered the home.

“The firefighters told me that once the house was filled with gas like that, a light switch could have set it off,” he said, sounding hollow. “That’s my family. They would have walked right through that front door.”

But instead, everyone was safe.

His daughters were staying with family members while he and some relatives figured out the next step.

Right now, that step is mostly sifting through the debris to see whether anything survived the explosion, the subsequent fire and the overnight rain.

While they worked, a stream of sightseers added to the family’s distress.

The blast reportedly was felt at least seven miles in either direction, and strangers from all over had come to see what had shaken their houses Saturday night.

“That county road has never seen so much traffic,” he said.

Brock said the family has been doing all it can to stay positive, as the blast came less than a week before Wittenborn is scheduled to have surgery for cancer.

“We’re very thankful to God that it was just material,” Brock said. “[Isaac] earlier just told me, you know, ‘I just didn’t need this right now.’”

tgraef@semissourian.com

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