Post by Rick (Admin) on Jul 27, 2013 13:50:47 GMT -5
Hanmer residents are still haunted by deadly explosion that rocked their community 50 years ago
Carole Paradis made a promise to her older
brother, Raymond Genereux, decades ago, that she would never forget him.
Paradis will honour that vow Aug. 3 with a reunion and social event marking the 50th anniversary of Raymond's death.
Raymond was 15, one of eight sons and two daughters born to Conrad and Blanche Genereux of Val Therese, when he died in an explosion and fire that devastated the small rural community Aug. 1, 1963.
Seven other people from the Hanmer area were killed after a gasoline leak caused an explosion and fire at a service station operated by Earle Matte, leased from Andre St. Amand, at what was then called Gauthier's Corner.
(Pizza Hut is now located on that sharp curve in Highway 69 as it leads from Sudbury into Hanmer.)
Killed were Matte's wife, Delilah Matte, 28, and their daughter, Norma, 4; Delilah's sister, Estelle Cloutier, 27, and son Vincent, 17 months; their mother, Alma D'Amour, 44; Raymond Genereux; Jo-anne Marois, 15; and Linda Duguay, 14.
The blast from the explosion could be heard five miles away.
Carole Paradis was 14 that day, and living on Kenneth Drive about a mile from the Matte gas station.
She and her family were at the dinner table enjoying a meal with an aunt and uncle from Timmins about 4 p.m.
Blanche received a phone call from Raymond, telling her he would be home for supper soon. Raymond wasn't a regular employee of the garage, but was filling in for his 17-year-old brother Roger, who had been injured in a horse-riding accident.
Meanwhile, a delivery of gasoline was being made by Sudbury truck driver Edward Thorpe, 27, at the gas station.
Reports of the day vary, but Thorpe said he was carrying two cases of oil into the garage while he plugged the nozzle of the hose from his truck into gas tanks underground at the building.
Matte's had a lunch counter that was a popular hangout for teenagers and others in the rural community. A salesman stopped in at the garage and noticed gasoline leaking on the ground from the hose.
Thorpe ran to the basement and tried, with the help of Delilah and two boys, to sop up the spilled gasoline.
He would later tell an inquest panel it didn't occur to him to call the fire department.
The spilled gasoline actuated the sump pump in the basement, which ignited a spark that would lead to tragedy.
Omer Tremblay, 63, was playing with his cousin in the backyard of his home on Kenneth Drive, just a few hundred feet from the gas station, when he heard a loud noise.
Tremblay witnessed a scene a 13-year-old should never have to see.
The gas station, which sold Shell products, exploded, lifting off its foundation, raining down in pieces like a giant smashed jigsaw puzzle, said Tremblay.
Now a carpenter at Vale Ltd., Tremblay will never forget that sight.
Reports in The Sudbury Star, which published two editions a day in 1963, quoted witnesses saying the blast sounded like an earthquake.
Carole and her family heard a loud boom and ran to the window, "and we saw that big black flame," she said last week. "We looked at each other and we all left."
They ran to the highway, in a hurry but not panicking. They were met by chaos. "We remember people saying, whispering, (that) Ray came out and then he went back in to save somebody. 'Ray, he must have been thrown and he doesn't know where he is.' Lots of talk," she said.
Tremblay watched in horror from across the road with others paralyzed by the shock of the explosion.
He was among bystanders who heard people buried under a pile of rubble cry for help.
Families waited anxiously for members who were thought to be at the gas station at the time of the explosion and were later found safe.
Five minutes after the explosion, the site became a giant fireball as flames tore through the flattened remnants of the gas station. Six people escaped or were rescued from the scene in those five minutes.
Bill Koehler, a retired Ontario Provincial Police officer now living on Manitoulin Island, was a 20-year-old photographer for the OPP charged with taking photographs of the scene.
Koehler never saw anything like it again in his long policing career.
Recalls going back Carole home where parish priest, Rev. A.R. Huneault, visited the family three times in the next couple of days.
For a devoutly Roman Catholic family like the Genereuxs, it helped as they waited for confirmation that Raymond, who had not come home, had died in the catastrophe.
It was 90 minutes before volunteer firefighters from Hanmer, Capreol and Blezard townships could put the fire out enough to search for bodies.
A devastated Earle Matte, who had driven by his garage 10 minutes earlier on his way to Hanmer after working a shift with a plumbing company, returned to his business.
He would later tell The Star that two bystanders, Dr. Ricardo Parraga and Stan Boivin, both of Hanmer, saved his life by preventing him from running into the burning building to try to rescue his wife, daughter and other family members.
Matte's 10-year-old son, Brian, was playing on the roof of a shed behind the family's living quarters above the garage.
Two other children, Mary Ellen, 8, and Mickey, 5, survived because they were away playing with ponies at a nearby farm.
"He told me one minute everything was quiet, the next minute he saw the deep freeze coming through the wall," Matte told The Sudbury Star about his son, Brian.
Carole's husband, Roland Paradis, was 14 and living in Blezard Valley when he and his family heard a tremendous blast.
They jumped in their car and headed toward the noise and dark smoke, parking two miles away at the tail end of a long line of cars driven there by curious, horrified local residents.
"Cars blew up, too, because it was a garage," said Roland, including a car that was being repaired on a hoist.
Reports indicated 30 to 40 gallons of gasoline was spilled and ran into the basement. Thorpe testified at the inquest he thought it was 15 gallons of gas.
Six deceased were listed fairly quickly, with Jo-anne Marois, 15, not found until 2 p.m. the next day. Two hours after that, Linda Duguay, 14, who suffered head injuries and fractures, died in hospital.
Ron Dupuis, now serving the area as the city's Ward 2 councillor, went to school with Marois in the Flour Mill. Jo- Anne and her family hadn't been living in the Hanmer area long before her death.
Dupuis said the accident horrified and saddened his family, who lived close to the Marois family, who also had several children. None had ever experienced such tragedy.
Some folks, like Rene Menard, escaped the explosion and inferno. "They went through hell," said Carole Paradis, who gets angry when she recalls people who escaped death being described as "injured."
"It makes it sound as if they didn't go through much."
When contacted last week by The Sudbury Star, Rene Menard, 64, said quietly, but politely, he didn't wish to recall the details of the tragedy.
Carole Paradis has invited Menard, the families of those killed, survivors and their families to the commemoration that will be held in the backyard of her Val Caron home.
She hopes the service -- a "reunion with a purpose" -- will help everyone still healing from the tragedy.
If Paradis could contact him, she would invite truck driver Edward Thorpe to the service.
Thorpe was both "censured and commended" by an inquest panel, The Star reported after the inquest that began Sept. 12, 1963.
He was praised for quick action in moving the truck that still had gallons of gasoline in it and censured for not calling the fire department immediately to help clean up the spill.
Coroner Dr. J.A. Pidutti called the explosion and fire the most horrible thing he had ever seen.
Carole Paradis said if Thorpe hadn't acted quickly to move his truck, flames could have spread to the gas station across the road.
"So, there would have been even more deaths ... so that's why to us, he's a hero, too."
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MORE INFO
An explosion and fire at a Val Therese gas station on Aug. 1
1963, took the lives of eight people:
* * Delilah Matte, 28, and four-year-old daughter Norma
* * Matte's sister Estelle Cloutier, 27, and baby son Vincent, 17 months
* * The women's mother, Alma D'Amour, 44
* * Raymond Genereux, 15
* * Joanne Marois, 15
* * Linda Duguay, 14
Others escaped death, but suffered serious physical and psychological injuries, including:
* * Giselle Labelle, 14;
* * Rene Menard, 14;
* * John Ross, 17;
* * Edward Thorpe, 27;
* * Harry Telenko, 33, and son Ricky, 9
The only tragedy in which more people were killed in Sudbury was a collision between a train and a bus in Coniston on Feb. 9, 1951. Nine people died and 30 were injured, some very seriously.
www.thesudburystar.com/2013/07/27/hanmer-residents-are-still-haunted-by-deadly-explosion-that-rocked-their-community-50-years-ago