Two brothers and their nephew nearly died in the Bristol nursing home blast. From the hospital on Christmas, they share how they survived.

Around 2:15 p.m. Tuesday, Samuel “Bull” Thomas pushed his older brother in a wheelchair down the first floor of the Bristol Health & Rehab Center.

As they rolled down the hallway, the 49-year-old Levittown resident smelled gas.

“People were still in there working, and there was a gas smell,” Thomas said Thursday. “There were people sitting behind desks — people just still walking around, like they were neglecting the smell.”

Moments later, Thomas and his brother arrived at the facility’s barbershop, where Thomas, a part-time barber, had cut his brother’s hair every two weeks. The Thomases are a close-knit family, and the nursing home had become their gathering place since Lamont “Bubs” Thomas, 59, suffered from a stroke several months ago.

Nearby stood the brothers’ nephew, Terence Aldridge, 42, who had started a job in the facility kitchen four days prior. Their sister, Terence’s mom, was on her way.

But within seconds, the visit turned catastrophic. As Samuel Thomas opened the door to the barbershop area and began to maneuver his brother’s wheelchair through the door, the building pancaked.

The force of the blast knocked his work boots off. The floor collapsed beneath the men, the ceiling fell on top of them, and they were soon fighting for each other’s lives in the basement below.

While crashing through the floor to the basement, Thomas gripped his brother’s wheelchair so tight he could feel his hands bleeding. Flames roared, while water from a burst pipe gushed around them.

“If I would have let him go, he would have fallen on his head in the basement,” Thomas said. “All this water was pouring down on my face.”

The three members of the Thomas family were among the 20 people injured in the fatal explosion that rocked the Lower Bucks County nursing facility. And while much remains unknown about what caused the blast, families of the victims like the Thomases spent the Christmas holiday gathered around hospital beds throughout the Philadelphia region, questioning the tragedy that occurred and counting their blessings.

Muthoni Nduthu, a 52-year-old nurse at the facility and mother to three sons, was killed in the blast. A second person who was killed, a resident at the nursing home, has not been identified. Saber Healthcare Group, which took over as the nursing home operator three weeks ago, said the company is evaluating its evacuation procedures.

“I’m alive,” Samuel Thomas said, in a Thursday interview from his bed at Lower Bucks Hospital. “That’s all I can say — I’m alive.”

Three days ago, that wasn’t guaranteed.

Helen Middlebrook, 58, was driving to the nursing home that afternoon for her daily visit with her “Bubs.” She would have been there with her brothers and son Terence when the building erupted, but by a stroke of luck, she had forgotten something at home and turned the car around.

Back at home in Croydon, she got a panicked call.

A violent blast. Nursing home in flames. People trapped under the wreckage.

She rushed back to Tower Road where she was faced with a chaotic “circus.” As she scrambled to locate her brothers and son, going from ambulance to ambulance, she said she became hysterical.

Samuel Thomas — his legs mangled — managed to drag himself and his brother to a stairwell landing, where first responders were able to rescue them, he recounted Thursday from the hospital.

His brother, whose injuries were the most severe, was in critical condition at the scene.

Middlebrook rejoiced when she heard her brothers were still alive. But she could not find her son.

Law enforcement officials said that, in the confusion after the explosion, the injured were whisked off to numerous area hospitals. A second explosion that followed the initial blast added to the chaotic response effort.

For four hours, Middlebrook searched emergency rooms in anguish for her “Papoose,” Terence’s family nickname.

She braced for the worst.

“My thought [was] that he was in the building, trapped or dead,” she said. “But God is good.”

Middlebrook and her husband found her son at Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, safe and breathing on a ventilator. Aldridge sustained cuts all over his body and lung damage due to smoke inhalation. He is expected to recover.

Samuel Thomas underwent surgery Wednesday on both legs, which were crushed by heavy wooden beams after the blast. He broke his right femur and fractured his ankle.

Lamont Thomas remains in critical condition at Temple University Hospital, his family members said. His spine is broken, the bones in his face are fractured, and he suffered severe burns. He had surgery on Thursday afternoon, his family said.

For now, Middlebrook said she would withhold speculation about who was at fault.

“We’re just praying everything goes the way it should go,” she said, in an interview on Thursday as she rushed between hospitals to see her brothers and son on Christmas.

“It’s a really bad situation.”

On Thursday morning, the two-acre campus at Bristol Health & Rehab Center sat deserted, save for local police officers stationed around the fenced-in nursing home.

There is no clear timeline for answers as to what caused the devastating explosion.

A Peco technician was called to the nursing facility and was there working in the basement shortly after 2 p.m. when the blast occurred. Some experts have already questioned why residents were not evacuated at the first smell of gas, in accordance with Peco’s own directives.

Peco referred questions to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the federal agency that is now leading the investigation.

Bristol Health & Rehab Center, formerly the Silver Lake Health Center, was cited repeatedly for substandard healthcare and unsafe building conditions under the management of CommuniCare Health Services, according to federal and state inspection records. Saber Healthcare Group acquired the facility home three weeks ago and gave it a new name. The company said it was working to fix deficiencies prior to the explosion.

A Saber representative said the company relocated about 120 residents to local hospitals and other assisted living facilities, while the investigators work to determine what led up to the explosion.

Peco, in its initial statement on Tuesday, said the gas technician had been called to the nursing home that afternoon due to the odor of gas. On Wednesday, Peco changed the timeline and said technicians had, in fact, arrived at the site hours earlier.

In a statement to The Inquirer Thursday, Peco president and CEO David Vahos said the company is committed to safety and deploys “considerable resources to inspect, maintain, and upgrade” its 14,000-mile network of gas lines.

While the NTSB is known for investigating high-profile transit accidents involving trains and aircraft, the agency sometimes intercedes after incidents involving gas pipelines.

An NTSB spokesperson said Wednesday that it could take days to clear a safe path in the debris and begin inspecting the gas line that fed the facility. The agency would “not determine or speculate about the cause of the accident” until the physical evidence had been gathered and analyzed from the scene.