BATH 

A woman is dead and four people hospitalized after an explosion and fire leveled a two-unit apartment building this morning, reducing it to bricks and blasting out windows in a quarter-mile radius. Neighbors made heroic rescues before officials arrived. 

Bath Fire Chief Steve Hinds confirmed the fatality this morning, and said four others were hospitalized with minor injuries, ranging from cuts to a foot injury. A resident of a nearby home was taken to Mid Coast Hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation.

Authorities did not immediately identify the deceased.

Twelve families were made homeless by the blast, Bath police Lt. Stanley Cielinski said.

Residents of Atlantic Townhouse Apartments were abruptly awakened at approximately 5 a.m. to an explosion so intense many thought another earthquake had shaken the Mid-coast.

The ensuing fire engulfed a two-unit building at 29-31 Bluff Road. The blast was so great it shattered glass in doors and windows up and down the quiet street at the rear of Bath Shopping Plaza.

“A lot of automobile glass was broken,” Hinds said.

Hinds could not confirm the cause of the explosion. The State Fire Marshal’s Office said this afternoon its investigation is focusing on propane as the likely cause.  

Propane was the only fuel source for the two-unit house, which was heated by gas heaters, Maine Department of Public Safety spokesman Steve McCausland said.

The State Medical Examiner’s Office will examine the body and establish positive identification. That process will continue Wednesday, McCausland said.  

The side-by-side duplex-unit home was occupied by a woman on one side and a man on the other. The man — Kenneth Hooper — had left for work at the nearby MacDonald’s about a half hour before the explosion. He heard about the explosion and returned to the house to find it in rubble and was overcome and then taken to the hospital. He was released later in the day.  

McCausland said three other neighbors living in nearby houses were “slightly” injured in the explosion aftermath.  

According to Hinds, the explosion happened a little after 5 a.m.  

By 6:30 a.m., the area surrounding the site was taped off so rescuers could search for a person believed to be in the unit at the time of explosion. 

Pants and shirts hung in the bare branches of a tree that stood beside the street, seeming to shelter the place where the home used to be as a backhoe sifted through the brick rubble, raising plumes of white smoke in the gray daybreak sky.

“There’s pieces of this building behind CVS,” the northernmost business in the shopping complex, Hinds said.

He estimated the debris field to be at least a quarter mile wide, with pieces of the building found as far away as Centre and Floral streets.

“Me and my neighbor, we get up at 5 and say hello to each other,” said Walter Alexander, who lives immediately across the street at 20 Bluff Road and witnessed the explosion. “I turned to the right and heard this loud roaring bang. The street just lit up.”

Alexander and neighbor Ron Gilbert helped a woman neighbors call “Mumma” get out of the unit at 32 Bluff Road.

Harvey Lane, who lives at 33 Bluff Road right next to the leveled building, said he was in bed when the explosion happened. 

“All it was, was one huge explosion,” Lane said. “It lifted me out of my bed. I ran to my living room and I walked across all the glass in my living room. It was just totally leveled. All I saw was a fireball. It was just leveled.”

He said he couldn’t get out of his door, which was on the fire side of the building and very hot. He pulled the screen off his bedroom window, grabbed his cat, put it in a blanket and passed it out the window to neighbors who then pulled him out the window.

“I was just lucky I wasn’t sleeping on the couch,” Lane said, “because I would have had glass all across me, and who knows.”

“All the windows are blown out,” said Lane, who said he’s lived in the building since 2002. “I have no idea how much more damage I’ve got. I’ve got a blue Trail Blazer that’s right there. I don’t know if the windows are in there.”

He saw one of his neighbors on scene after the explosion and fire but said fire crews were still looking for the woman who lived in the unit on the other side.

Tabatha Bishop lives on Middle Street and said her dresser drawers and closet doors were shaking back and forth for about 30 seconds when the explosion happened.

Tony Colby, who lives across the street adjacent to the site of the explosion, said he’d gone to the bathroom around 4:15 a.m. and had gone back to sleep and “there was just a big explosion.” 

“I thought it was something upstairs or outside,” Colby said. “My wife and daughter came down and looked out and saw the fire and that’s when we realized the house went up… It just kind of shook the whole house.”

Yvonne Colby said someone had been messing with the propane tank out back, “and that’s what exploded.”

Victoria Lowe was on the scene of the explosion this morning and said she had heard there was a propane tank malfunction and the tank blew. 

Her mother and stepfather heard the explosion from Central Avenue.

The explosion also woke up City Councilor Carolyn Lockwood on High Street, who said “it was certainly an explosion. It definitely shook the house.”

She represents the ward that includes Bluff Road and could see emergency vehicles turning up Centre Street. She could see the huge plume of smoke and smell it as well.

“I was just there over the weekend to make sure they were plowed out properly,” Lockwood said.

The neighborhood consists of apartment buildings and modest single-family homes on a winding road made more narrow by towering snow banks. The development was built during World War II to house shipyard workers, McCausland said.

Bath, Brunswick, West Bath and Phippsburg fire departments responded, with Woolwich providing station coverage. Phippsburg and Brunswick rescue units also responded.