Warning About Gas Leak Fails; Blast Burns 3

When she smelled fumes and heard a loud, hissing sound coming from the gas meter on her neighbor’s house, a Lakewood woman telephoned the emergency number for the Southern California Gas Co.

But no one was sent to investigate until Wednesday--48 hours later.

By then a gas explosion had destroyed the house in a blast so powerful that it blew debris two blocks away and critically injured the mother and her two children who lived there.

The explosion, shortly after 11 p.m. Tuesday, blew the roof off the home in the 4500 block of Eastbrook Avenue, authorities said. The blast also shattered windows in five homes and damaged four cars.

Gas company officials acknowledged Wednesday that they received the call Sunday night and that no one was sent to check for a possible gas leak. They are investigating, they said, to determine if any of their personnel erred in evaluating the call.

Meanwhile, Debra J. Bells, 34, and her two children, Charles, 4, and Kizzie, 5, are fighting for their lives at the Sherman Oaks Community Hospital burn center, where they are reported in critical condition.

Bells and her son stumbled out of the demolished house Tuesday into the arms of neighbors who rushed to rescue the family. Kizzie was pulled from under the rubble that was once the living room of the two-bedroom home.

Relatives said Bells, a secretary at Hughes Aircraft Co. in Long Beach, mentioned to them repeatedly that she smelled gas and was going to call the gas company.

Lee Harrington, vice president in charge of operations, said the company’s records do not show that Bells contacted them.

Bells’ neighbor, Gerry McNulty, said her daughter, Colleen, came home around 11 p.m. Sunday and heard the hissing noise from the gas meter when she went into her bedroom. Her bedroom window is about 10 feet from the wall of Bells’ home where the gas meter was located.

Colleen went outside to check the sound and came back to tell her mother. They decided to call the gas company. McNulty said the gas company employee who answered the phone said it was not unusual to hear such sounds and that maybe the neighbors had turned on their heat.

Temperatures reached a high of 92 degrees Sunday.

“I said: ‘Lady, use some common sense,’ ” McNulty said. “ ‘Who would put a heater on? It’s a hundred degrees out.’ ”

Michael Stacy, a neighbor who went to Bells’ aid, said Wednesday that he and a friend “went running up and when we got here, the mother came running out yelling, ‘My kids! My kids!’ The skin on her legs and her arms was burned off. Her hair was burned off.”

Stacy, who stood outside the demolished house Wednesday morning with his 2-year-old daughter, Michelle, in his arms, recalled racing inside looking for the children. He screamed out: “Where were they?” and heard the mother yell back that Kizzie was on the couch.

But the room was rubble and Stacy said he did not see a couch. He only heard a whimper and began to dig through debris in search of the sound.

“Then, I saw a little . . . arm poking out,” said Stacy, a warehouse supervisor for the Ralphs grocery chain.

After carrying Kizzie outside, Stacy said he turned back to look for Charles, but the friend with him said the child had emerged from the front door as Stacy went inside the burning house.

Clint Tate, who lives across the street, was working in his study when he heard the explosion and looked up to see an orange fireball. He rushed outside, he said, and scooped up Charles.

“I took him across the street and told my wife to get sheets,” Tate said. “We laid him down and poured water on him. He plays with my little boy and he’s my buddy too. (The boy) said: ‘Hug me, Clint, hug me.’ He looked me right in the eyes and said: ‘I love you, Clint,’ and I said: ‘I love you too, Charlie.’ ”

Tate, Stacy, and a third neighbor, Stanley Whittet, who lives next door to the Bells, continued to pour water over the victims until paramedics arrived. The injured were moved down the street to the high school parking lot and put on helicopters to Long Beach Memorial Hospital until they were transferred Wednesday morning to Sherman Oaks.

The gas company records calls to its emergency line and has a tape of McNulty’s call. McNulty’s remark about the heater is “a pretty accurate description of the conversation,” Harrington said. “I think what the dispatcher was trying to indicate was that appliances do go on at night. In this case it wasn’t a heater, although that’s what (the dispatcher mentioned) it might have been.”

Harrington said the dispatcher tried to persuade McNulty to go next door and knock on Bells’ door and have her call the company if she smelled gas. McNulty said she would not do that, Harrington said.

McNulty said Harrington is right. She did tell the dispatcher she would not go next door. “I was angry at that point,” McNulty said, “because I thought my call was being treated like a nuisance call. . . . She wanted me to dump it back on my neighbor.”

The attitude of the dispatcher, McNulty said, was “like I was bothering her.”

Harrington also said that preliminary reports from the scene indicate that the leak may have been inside the house at the kitchen stove. Investigators found a taped connection pipe on the gas stove, he said.

The fire was confined to the side of the house where the meter was, he said, because the explosion broke the gas pipe at that point.

Investigators from the Public Utilities Commission and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Fire departments combed through the rubble Wednesday looking for clues. Stuffed toys--a gray rabbit, a brown teddy bear, a pink Critter--were strewn on the front lawn where they were hurled by the force of the explosion.

PUC officials said gas companies are required to notify the PUC safety department whenever there is an explosion and that Southern California Gas had complied. If the company is found negligent, it could be fined or suffer other penalties, said Russ Copeland, chief of the PUC’s utilities safety branch.

Fire Battalion Chief Roy Chapman, who directed operations at the scene Tuesday night, said the extent of damage to the house shows that it was filled with a large amount of gas when the Bells family arrived home. Neighbors said the family arrived home about 20 minutes before the explosion.

A roof can often be blown off in such an explosion, Chapman said, but when the interior ceiling is also gone, as in this case, such damage means a large amount of gas was present. Chapman and other fire officials at the scene said turning on a light switch or lighting a cigarette could spark an explosion when gas is present. Bells is a smoker, relatives and neighbors said.

Chapman said that if his department had received a call about a hissing sound from a meter, it would have responded immediately and then notified the gas company.

“We’re the primary responsible agency,” he said, adding that the 911 emergency number is the first place to call if there are fumes or hissing sounds from a pipe or meter.

Times staff writers Tina Griego and David Haldane contributed to this story.