Survivors recount persistent gas smell, lack of concern by staff and a smoke break before explosion rocked Bristol nursing home

Robert Flesch was sitting in his first-floor room at the Bristol nursing home shortly after 9 a.m. on Dec. 23 when a staffer poked her head in to tell him he should go to the activity room. There was a gas leak near his room, the staffer told him, and Peco had been notified.

Flesch, who is 64 and an amputee, rolled his wheelchair into the hallway. “The whole hall smelled like gas,” he recalled.

Peco workers had already arrived, but nobody mentioned the possibility of needing to evacuate the 174-bed facility, Flesch said. Staffers did not seem concerned about the gas smell, and it was otherwise a typical Tuesday at the Bristol Health & Rehab Center, formerly known as Silver Lake Nursing Home.

Around 1:30 p.m., Flesch said he was told Peco had fixed “a pretty big leak” and that he could go back to his room. But the hallway outside his room had the same strong odor. “I’m telling you I still smell gas,” he said he told three staffers. He was reassured that it was just residual odor from the repaired leak.

Just after 2 p.m., another resident, Susie Gubitosi, was back inside after joining several other residents on the patio for a cigarette break. Gubitosi — known to friends as Susie Q — had become blind three years ago from glaucoma and was waiting for a staffer to help her remove old nail polish.

That’s when the place exploded.

“Suddenly I heard this loud boom,” Gubitosi, 71, said.

The blast knocked her out of her wheelchair, and debris slammed against her “as fast and hard as it could,” she said. “Next thing I’m on the floor, and I’m laying on my right-hand side, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God.’”

The explosion, just after 2:15 p.m., killed Muthoni Nduthu, a 52-year-old nurse at the facility and mother to three sons. A second person who died, a resident, has not been identified. Twenty others were injured.

Flesch’s and Gubitosi’s accounts, told to The Inquirer in interviews over the last few days, give an expanded timeline of events before two explosions rocked the center. Their recollections underscore the key questions facing investigators from multiple agencies as they seek to determine the cause of the explosion and assess whether Peco, the nursing home, or both may have been negligent.

Peco officials initially said their workers arrived at the nursing home around 2 p.m. They subsequently acknowledged their workers had been on site for several hours.

On Friday, Peco said in a statement that since the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is leading the investigation, “we are not permitted to comment on this matter.”

The NTSB said it didn’t have any additional information but expects to release a preliminary report in about three weeks. In an earlier statement, it said investigators would test the natural gas service line that runs from the street to the basement of the impacted building, gather records, and interview witnesses, first responders, nursing home staff, and Peco employees.

Saber Healthcare Group, a privately run for-profit company that acquired the Bristol nursing home three weeks before the explosion and rebranded it, did not respond to requests for comment Friday. Saber has relocated about 120 residents to local hospitals and other assisted living facilities. It says it is reevaluating its evacuation procedures.

The previous owners, Ohio-based CommuniCare Health Services, had received numerous citations for unsafe building conditions and substandard care.

Recuperating in St. Mary’s Medical Center in Langhorne, Gubitosi said she felt as if her life was over.

Immediately, the former Bethlehem resident knew it was a gas explosion. “I heard shouting, screaming, moaning, and sirens,” she said.

“This place just blew up. And I thought, ‘Am I dying?’ I didn’t know,” she said. She was relieved when she could wiggle her toes. “I think I’m all in one piece,” she thought.

“Because I’m blind, it scared me even more. I felt ice cold water on me. The sprinkler system must have come on and I was drenched. But I was glad because I had dust, cement dust, soot all in my mouth, on my face, in my eyes and nose. And I was just trying to breathe.”

She cried repeatedly for help. “I heard all these voices and things moving. It was pandemonium. I could hear the EMT guys saying, ‘They’re in here! We’ve got to get them out! The building is going to collapse!’”

» READ MORE: Two brothers and their nephew tell how they nearly died in the Bristol nursing home blast.

She heard one EMT, as he lifted her up, say, “This is the first patient that’s been crushed.”

Doctors in the hospital used staples to close a gash on her hairline. Her back, neck, and sternum are broken. She had surgery last week to repair fractures in her elbow and hand.

The pain, she said, is at times unbearable, even with medication. “It’s hard to breathe,” she said, lying in her hospital bed with her neck in a large brace, bandages that run from her hand to elbow, and IVs.

“It feels literally like an elephant put his foot on me and crushed me,” she said. “I was probably this close to death.”

She doesn’t know yet how long she’ll be hospitalized or where she will be placed next.

“Lawsuits are coming,” said Jordan Strokovsky, an attorney representing Gubitosi. ”There will be answers. There will be accountability.”

Flesch, who lost his left leg from a brown recluse spider bite, said he doesn’t understand why he was given the green light to return to his room.

A former pool and spa tradesman from Levittown, he had been a Bristol resident a short time, sifting through a file he kept of apartments he could possibly call his next home.

“Suddenly, there was this loud boom!,” he recalled.

“I’ve never been in anything like that in my life,” he said. “I was in shock because all the glass from my windows came flying out. Then the ceiling was coming down. The wall was coming down.”

Glass shards piled a foot deep in his room, even deeper in the hallway. Crumpled furniture was hurtled everywhere. Flesch maneuvered his wheelchair through glass to check on the bedridden man across the hall. He was OK.

The facility’s part-time psychologist helped Flesch and many others get outside safely.

“It was complete chaos,” he said.

The explosion left Flesch, now staying in a nursing home in Nazareth, Pa., with nothing more than scratches on his arms.

“I am still asking myself how I survived,” he said. “It must be God. I can’t explain it any other way.”