The cause of Tuesday’s downtown explosion and fire hasn’t officially been identified but John Zukowski thinks it was natural gas.
The building that was destroyed was operated as the Achillion restaurant from 1981 until it closed in 2016 and it has been unoccupied since then. Before that, it was the city’s Greyhound bus terminal.
Zukowski, a retired firefighter and former private investigator, suspects somebody gained access to the building and punctured a gas line.
“I will guess somebody was going in there and stealing metal and they probably hit a gas line and the gas leaked and they just left it. That kind of volumetric explosion only comes from a gas explosion. Given the age of that building, depending on when that place was broken into, that would be enough time for enough gas to build up to give that kind of impact.”
Zukowski’s Fourth Avenue shop, Pacific Body Jewellery & Piercing, is only about 100 metres away. Zukowski was still at home sleeping at the time of the explosion but the video camera in his shop he has pointed across the street at Jim’s Clothes Closet shows the windows of neighbouring Walk-Rite Shoes breaking from the blast at 7:06 a.m.
“All the windows at Walk-Rite just disappear,” said Zukowski. “That was powerful. My camera is inside the building and literally, it shakes. The blast would come from the building, hit our building and echo across. All our stuff is double thermal pane and smaller windows, whereas on the other side of the street, all that glass is huge sheets that are super flexible. They’ll take a lot of high-end concussion but they didn’t survive the low-end concussion of the blast.”
Zurowski posted the video of the gas blast on YouTube.
