OCONOMOWOC - An explosion and fire Wednesday demolished a nearly century-old church, gutted two homes and injured seven people, including a utility worker, in this lakeside community 30 miles west of Milwaukee.
Road and sewer work was being done in downtown Oconomowoc before the explosion occurred around 1:30 p.m. at the First Baptist Church, said Bob Duffy, the city's economic development director. The blast and flying debris knocked over several workers, he said.
"It shook my house," said Joy Freudenstein, 30, who lives three blocks away and was doing some cleaning when she heard a boom. "It sounded like someone downstairs blew something up."
We Energies had received a call from a contractor about an hour earlier, saying workers smelled gas and may have hit a line, company spokesman Brian Manthey said. The company sent out a crew, and one of its workers was among the injured, he said.
That worker was transported by helicopter to Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in suburban Milwaukee where he was being treated, hospital spokeswoman Carolyn Bellin said.
Three men and one woman, one of them a firefighter, were treated at Oconomowoc Memorial Hospital for cuts, bruises, abrasions and some smoke inhalation, said spokeswoman Sandra Peterson. All four had been released by Wednesday night, she said.
Duffy said two other firefighters were treated for lesser injuries.
Rick James of We Energies said the utility turned off natural gas service to about 150 customers in the area around the church.
Two investigators from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were sent to the scene, said Christine Zortman, assistant area director in Milwaukee.
After the blast and fire, white smoke billowed from the church wreckage and a neighboring home, obscuring the view of the 100 or so people who had gathered outside.
Waukesha County Board Supervisor Kenneth Herro works a block away as a real estate agent and said he heard the explosion. He and other workers walked right over.
"The church basically had disappeared," Herro said.
He smelled natural gas and ambulances were pulling away as he arrived, he said. One house on each side of the church was on fire, he said.
The explosion shook the downtown area, Herro said.
"We have really large windows, all the windows just kind of bowed out," he said.
The church is in a residential area, with a popular swimming beach on the shore of Lake Lac La Belle beach across the street.
Sam Brink has served as a temporary pastor at the church since January. He said it has about 35 members, mainly in their late 70s and 80s.
Congregants had been especially fond of the church's stained glass windows and pipe organ, Brink said, but the greatest loss was to a decades-old collection of sermons recorded on CDs.
"That's an oral history, and now it's gone forever," he said. "So many memories, gone."
Arlo Reichter, executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Wisconsin, said First Baptist Church has been a member since 1895 and the building was built in 1912 and 1913.
He said he was in disbelief and horrified when he heard of the explosion. He didn't think anyone was in the church at the time.
"I'm concerned for some of the elderly members of the congregation who may well have been baptized there as young people and maybe raised up their own families and now they are grandparents," he said. "The emotional and spiritual shock is going to be very real."
There are about two dozen other member churches in the area, he said, with 60 altogether in the state.
The group has been flooded with e-mails and calls from concerned people all over the country in the hours after the explosion, Reichter said.
City Clerk Diane Coenen said emergency workers were evacuating nearby homes and businesses to a nearby school shortly after the explosion.
Oconomowoc is about 30 miles west of Milwaukee with a population of 12,500.
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(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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