Overnight Parking

Most of the evening, Truck Driver George Rutherford paced nervously around his room in Roseburg, Ore.'s Umpqua Hotel. Once he walked the three blocks to the Gerretsen Building Supply Co. to look over the blue 1959 Ford truck he had parked on the street after a 290-mile drive from his home plant, Pacific Powder Co. of Tenino, Wash.. Cause for his worry: his cargo consisted of two tons of dynamite and 4 1/2 tons of Car-Prill (a highly explosive mixture--ammonium nitrate and oil) that he was to deliver to customers at dawn. About 1 a.m.. back in his hotel, he heard fire engines roar by, ran toward his truck. He still had half a block to go and a corner to turn when a blockbusting blast smashed him against the ground. Clocks all over Roseburg (pop. 12,200) stopped with hands pointing at 1:13 a.m.

The fire engines had been headed for a minor flare-up in some trash barrels a few feet from where Rutherford "had parked his death-laden truck. Assistant Fire Chief Roy McFarlane thought he had things under control, sent one fireman to the hospital with burned hands. City Patrolman Don DeSues, 32, took over traffic direction at the nearest corner. Suddenly, George Rutherford's truck went off with a blast bigger than a World War II blockbuster, dug a 50-ft.-wide crater 20 ft. deep, pulverized six blocks of business buildings, transients' apartments and homes, smashed the windows and badly damaged a 23-block area, knocked people out of bed for eight miles around.

"I looked up to see the mushroom cloud," said Hotelman Paul Ryan. Instead he saw a 300-ft. pillar of flame. One squad car flew 100 ft., its dome light and driver cop left largely undamaged. Across the street from the truck, the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. fell into a level pile of rubble. The Gerretsen store's stock of bolts and nuts sprayed like fragmentation shards. One eight-year-old boy was carried to the hospital with a finger-sized piece of steel driven into his brain. The only traces to be found of Traffic Policeman DeSues were his uniform buttons and a key-filled pants pocket, which lay scattered along the gutter in the next block.

Minutes after the blast, Roseburg began to rally. From the Rumblebees Motorcycle Club to the National Guard, volunteer forces backed up police and firemen, sealed off the 23-block danger area, hauled the 52 injury cases to hospitals, kept out looters. Damage estimates ran to $12 million, but the count on the dead was harder to come by. The coroner's deputies accounted for twelve bodies, then sent off for lab tests samples of lighter ashes that might be eight or more transients in transient apartments. Five blocks from the crater lay a bent axle, the biggest piece left of the truck that Driver Rutherford parked in a sleeping town.

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