‘Roseburg Blast’ forced city to rebuild

Dennis Tandy was heading home from work.

He was on his way back from a late-night shift working at Nordic Veneer, a veneer manufacturer based east of Roseburg, to pick up his wife, Marilyn Tandy, from her father’s house on Military Avenue.

Mike Coen was sleeping.

The day before, he’d been helping his father run his building supply company, Coen Supply in Roseburg, while on summer break from Willamette University. The Coens competed with the Gerretsens, a family who ran Gerretsen Building Supply downtown, but Mike Coen said they considered each other friends. For now, he was peaceful, quietly asleep in his home on Chadwick Street.

Eighteen blocks away, the Tandys were finally on their way to their home on Southeast Kane Street. As they passed by Gerretsen Building Supply, they noticed a fire blazing from the structure. Dennis told Marilyn to get help. She ran to a nearby Shell gas station where a young attendant, Dave Hanks, called the fire department. It was 1:05 a.m.

Cheryl Ford was looking out a window.

Her father owned the Umpqua Hotel downtown, about a block away from Gerretsen Building Supply. Gathered for a family reunion in Roseburg, Ford and four of her cousins were staying on the hotel’s top floor. After getting food from the hotel kitchen earlier that night, they gathered to look outside their open windows at the growing flames down the street.

Nick Lehrbach heard a cry of “fire.”

He looked out the windows of his house on Fowler Street, windows that were open because of the heat wave passing through town that week. Only a few blocks away from the fire, he decided to go check it out. After making it to Douglas Street, he turned down an alleyway which led to the Rite Aid store downtown.

Marilyn Tandy ran back to her husband, Dennis. He told her to get the car, and get away from the fire. Firefighters began to arrive and the blaze grew stronger.

She didn’t know that once she turned around the corner, it would be the last time she’d ever see her husband alive. He was 18 years old.

A few minutes later, at 1:14 a.m. on Aug. 7, 1959, a truck parked next to the supply company loaded with 2 tons of dynamite and 4.5 tons of blasting agent detonated, leveling eight city blocks and severely damaging 22 more. Dennis Tandy and 13 others would lose their lives. The oldest, Harrison Carmichael, was 70 years old. The youngest, Virginia Kuykendall, was only 4. In the end, 125 more would be injured.

The Roseburg Blast, as it came to be known, was one of the most devastating events in Oregon’s history, causing upward of $12 million in damages. When adjusted for inflation, the damage amounted to $122,190,103 in today’s dollars. To put that amount into perspective, it is more than the current annual budget of just over $100 million for the entire city of Roseburg.

The blast left a crater 20 feet deep and 52 feet wide next to what is now Southeast Pine Street. Tremors were felt up to 17 miles away, and the explosion could be heard 30 miles from the epicenter.

“All of a sudden, you just saw things in the air, and then boom, it knocked us unconscious,” Ford said. “We were thrown back against the wall. I don’t know how long we were out, but once we got up, we were all screaming.”

The walls and ceilings of the hotel caved in. Cheryl and her friends were forced to tourniquet her cousin’s leg, which suffered a large cut along her thigh. They crawled across the floor, cutting themselves on broken glass and sliding down rubble on the stairs to make it to the ground level. Their father met them downstairs, breaking into tears of relief.

After the blast, the only hospital in town was full. Cheryl had to dig glass out of her own legs for days.

“Every time I heard a siren after that, I would go into shock almost,” Ford said.

Lehrbach was saved by walking down the alleyway in downtown Roseburg, the walls preventing the shockwave from striking him. Glass, however, rained on him from the windows above.

Nancy Lehrbach, Nick’s future wife, was asleep in her home when the window in her bedroom fell onto her head.

“I didn’t get cut, but I was laying there in a bed of glass,” Lehrbach said. “There was a shard in my pillow 2 inches deep. So I felt very fortunate.”

Jo Anne Nelson, who was only 5 when the blast occurred, woke up to her sister screaming in another room. Her sister was thrust out of bed from the explosion, and the orange glow from the fire outside led her to believe the house was on fire. Nelson walked downstairs to the kitchen to see what had happened, but her father scooped her up before she could get very far. Their floor was covered in broken glass.

“The next thing I know, the entire neighborhood is out in their pajamas and slippers,” Jo Anne Nelson said. “We’re all walking towards a home that overlooked Roseburg, and we’re all standing there watching our city burn. That always stuck in my brain when I was little.”

In the days and weeks before the blast, children were swimming in the municipal pool on Jackson Street, getting milkshakes from Woolworth’s and the J.J. Newberry store, eating maple bars from Weber’s bakery and staying cool by going to one of the three movie theaters downtown. Now, it was all smoldering ruins — and in an instant, a community was forced to rebuild from the ground up.

“it was horrible,” said Dick Stark, who was 32 years old at the time of the explosion. He was driving home from work when the blast happened — and had just passed Gerretsen’s earlier that night.

“All the windows were torn out and it was a real mess,” Stark said. “Unbelievable what that thing did.”

According to a report conducted by the National Board of Fire Underwriters and the Oregon Insurance Rating Bureau immediately after the blast, at the time of the disaster, Roseburg had no prevention code regarding the transportation of explosives. Only months before, a fire prevention code had been proposed to the Roseburg City Council, a code that would have prevented a truck loaded with explosives from parking in a populated and congested area.

When the Pacific Powder Company truck arrived in Roseburg that evening, there was no permit required or regulatory protections in place — not for transportation, storage or the overnight parking that was eventually deemed responsible for the blast.

“A lot of people blame the guy who parked the truck there,” Mike Coen said. “But anybody could have been in the same position.”

After the explosion, Nancy Lehrbach took part in her first ever volunteering event. She worked with Florence Jacoby at the Episcopal church, who organized a group of young women to walk around with metal jugs full of lemonade and cookies, bringing them around to the National Guardsmen now shutting off access to the downtown — a downtown that, the day before, was bustling with life, activity, excitement — and now lay in ruins.

Roseburg was now tasked with finding a way to rebuild it downtown epicenter — and out of the tragedy came an opportunity to revitalize the town’s design from the ground up.

In October of 1959, a disaster recovery plan was issued by Clark-Coleman & Associates, which gave recommendations on how to improve Roseburg’s downtown area. It proposed an overpass bridge over the South Umpqua River along Washington Avenue, passing over Pine Street and ending in a parking area downtown.

The plan also envisioned creating a pedestrian centered downtown, increasing the amount of parking in the city and creating a park along the South Umpqua River. None of the plans would come to fruition due to a lack of funding, but the Washington Avenue bridge was constructed shortly after the blast, although the overpass design was never brought to light.

Gerretsen Building Supply was destroyed in the blast. Don Meyers, who was 43 at the time, had worked at Gerretsen installing garage doors. He founded his own business, Overhead Door Company, and began helping Gerretsen rebuild from the ground up. After spending 5 years in a different location, Gerretsen Building Supply opened its new building on Odell Street in 1964. The company will celebrate its 100-year anniversary next year.

“I think it was a story of survival,” Jo Anne Nelson said. “This little town could have gone in a totally different direction, but it kind of rose from the ashes and kept going.”

It’s quiet now at the site where the Roseburg blast took place 63 years ago. A rock engraved with a small plaque commemorates the exact site of the explosion — not just a reminder of a devastating event, but the resilience of Roseburg as a whole.

“I don’t think it changed Roseburg forever,” Cheryl Ford said. “I just think the memory will always be there for us who were there at the time. That never ends. Hopefully, it helps us realize we’re tough, and we can heal.”