BATH

One person is dead and four hospitalized after an explosion and fire leveled a two-unit apartment building this morning, reducing it to bricks and blasting the glass out of windows in a quartermile radius. Neighbors made heroic rescue efforts before officials arrived.

Bath Fire Chief Steve Hinds confirmed the fatality this morning, and said four other people 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.

Officials searched for other casualties. An investigator from the Office of the State Fire Marshal is also on scene this morning. Authorities did not immediately identify the deceased this morning.

Residents of Atlantic Townhouse Apartments awoke to an explosion so intense many thought another earthquake shook the Mid-coast.

The ensuing fire engulfed a two-unit building at 36 Bluff Road. The blast was so great it shattered glass in doors and windows up and down the quiet street running along the backside of Bath Shopping Plaza.

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

Hinds could not confirm the cause of the explosion. He told the Associated Press he suspects the fire was started by a propane or natural gas 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.

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

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

“I actually thought a car exploded,” said Dave Mullins, who lives at 19 Bluff Road.

By 6:30 a.m., the area surrounding the site was taped off so rescuers could search for victims.

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

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

Tony Colby, who lives 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 when “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, who was on the scene of the explosion this morning, said she had heard there was a propane tank malfunction.

Her mother and stepfather heard the explosion from Central Avenue.

The explosion also woke up Bath City Councilor Carolyn Lockwood, who lives on High Street.

“It was certainly an explosion. It definitely shook the house,” Lockwood said.

Lockwood, who represents the ward that includes Bluff Road, said she could see the emergency vehicles turning up Centre Street, and could see and smell the huge plume of smoke.

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

The neighborhood sits behind a shopping plaza and consists of apartment buildings and modest single-family homes on a winding road made more narrow by towering snow banks.

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