GH couple to appear on The History Channel

Witnesses give account of explosion on ‘Shockwave’

Susan Schell

of the Gateway

It was almost exactly a year ago today when Steve Lawson of Gig Harbor watched the Atlas Foundry explode while he was talking to his wife on the phone.

Steve and Carla Lawson’s account of the explosion at the Tacoma Foundry aired on the History Channel’s “Shockwave” last month and will air again at 2 p.m. Saturday.

On Oct. 6, 2007, Steve Lawson was working at the Titus-Will Ford Toyota Dealership up the hill from the foundry, also known as Atlas Castings and Technology, when he saw a fire break out.

“Flames were shooting about 75 feet in the air,” he said.

Lawson later learned that a tanker truck delivering propane to the facility had a faulty connection. The propane leaked and burst into flames when it reached a furnace.

At about that time, Carla Lawson was returning from a shopping trip at the Tacoma Mall and traveling along state Route 16. When she saw the flames in such proximity to her husband’s work, she called to see if Titus-Will was on fire.

“A wave of heat came right through my car,” she said. “I called Steve and said ‘What’s on fire?’ ”

Steve Lawson said it was about 10 minutes before the first explosion.

“Carla called and said that, when she crossed the overpass, her car windows were really hot.”

Carla pulled off the freeway to make the call. That’s when a huge explosion rocked the foundry.

“He said, ‘That’s the biggest fireball I’ve ever seen,’ ” Carla Lawson said. “But then again, I don’t know how many fireballs he’s seen.”

“It looked like Napalm going off,” Steve Lawson said. “There were so many colors — black, orange and white. What was amazing was that, after the explosion, even five or six blocks away, it was so hot. You could feel the heat from that far away. My first thought was, ‘I bet there were a lot of people hurt or killed.’ ”

Amazingly, there was only one fatality: the truck driver of the leaky propane rig. He was badly burned while attempting to cap off the leak and, although he escaped the impact when the truck exploded and was rescued from the scene by fire fighters, he died four days later.

“The driver was trying to stop the leak,” Steve Lawson said. “When the tanker blew, the dual rear wheels of the truck were thrown up on the freeway.”

“The flames were huge,” Carla Lawson said. “I’m not good at spacial guesstimating, but they were shooting way up over the overpass.

“Before the explosion, there were drivers actually stopping on the overpass and taking pictures of the fire with their cell phones. I wonder what happened to them.”

Steve Lawson said he walked to the end of the dealership after the explosion to see if any of the showroom windows had blown out. Someone at his workplace had already put pictures of the fire online.

Lawson made prints and was showing them to people when The Seattle Times newspaper called the dealership to ask about pictures. Word had mistakenly got around that Lawson had taken them, but he talked to the Times, anyway.

About an hour later, Lawson’s eyewitness account was printed on the Times’ Web site.

Three months later, the couple received a call from TruTV, which wanted to interview them.

“They kept asking me if I was afraid, and if I feared for my life,” Carla Lawson said. “But I just said ‘No,’ because, at the time, I didn’t even know what was going on.”

“We couldn’t give them what they wanted,” Steve Lawson said.

“Our film footage probably ended up on the cutting room floor,” Carla Lawson said. “They didn’t think we were exciting enough.”

The producers for The History Channel didn’t agree. The network came out to the Lawsons’ home and interviewed them in their backyard, and it included their accounts in a TV segment along with firefighters, EMTs and film footage of the explosion.

The “Shockwave” episode of the Atlas Foundry explosion, Episode No. 31, is expected to re-run several times on The History Channel after Saturday.

For additional listings, visit www.thehistorychannel.com and search for “Shockwave, Episode 31.”

History on TV

Steve and Carla Lawson of Gig Harbor will be part of The History Channel’s coverage of the Tacoma Foundry explosion this weekend.

You can see the program at 2 p.m. Saturday on The History Channel.

Reach reporter Susan Schell at 253-853-9240 or by e-mail at susan.schell@gateline.com.