'It was chaos': Doughnut shop staff jumped into action to help victims of explosion
'I wouldn't call us heroes. We just did what was necessary,' said Katherine Saunby at Daydream Donuts Café
Katherine Saunby was starting her day at her family's downtown doughnut shop when an explosion rocked the building.
In the chaos that followed, Daydream Donuts Café became a staging ground for people recovering from the blast felt throughout the city of Prince George early Tuesday morning.
Three people were taken to hospital, including one with critical injuries who has since been transported to the Vancouver Coastal Health region for care.
But there are fears there could be more victims, with people who live and work in the area saying the source of the explosion — a former restaurant — was often used as a place of shelter for people without homes.
Fire crews are expected to begin the process of examining the scene in more detail Wednesday, while police are treating the explosion as suspicious.
Nearby businesses are now cleaning up, as RCMP have reopened most of the streets that were closed Tuesday to give first responders a chance to secure the area.
Saunby says other than some lost ceiling tiles, Daydream Donuts seems to have escaped unscathed and is once again serving customers, something she calls "miraculous" given how close they are to the site of the explosion.
A neighbouring building, she says, had a hole blasted through its wall.
But, she said, there is still residual anxiety from the blast and the chaos that followed.
She spoke to CBC Daybreak North host Carolina de Ryk about the experience.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What went through your mind when that blast happened?
My mom came around the corner of the kitchen to face me. She said, "What was that?"
I said, "That was an explosion."
We all came out the front and we could see the the plume of smoke. There was debris across the road and people were running toward the building.
So I jumped on 911 and my brother's fiancé jumped on 911 just to try to get the paramedics in as fast as possible. My brother's fiancé, he ran up the street to the corner to get a better view of what was happening.
I was kind of trying to keep traffic from going up that street. People were immediately driving up there trying to take pictures and see what was happening, [and] I was waving my arm to turn or to go straight rather than coming right down.
What what else were you seeing?
We have a dense homeless population in the downtown core and a lot of them were running toward the building because they knew people were there and they were trying to get their friends out.
But at the same time we didn't know what caused the explosion, so I was on 911 trying to get the paramedics down, as well as yelling to people to stop running toward the building.
There were some city workers working on the park behind the building and one of them was quite severely injured.
They helped the city worker come down closer to where the bakery is, and laid her on the sidewalk.
While we waited for paramedics to show up, another lady ran up the street from one of the office buildings ... and she had a first aid kit.
That's when the police started showing up and trying to block the road off.
It was chaos at first because there were people running toward the building and people coming out of the building and we just didn't know what had happened.
What was going through your mind as all of this was unfolding so rapidly around you?
For us downtown here, it was more of, "We need to make sure everybody's OK. So, instead of feeling scared, it kind of kicks in like, "OK, assess the situation, help who we can and get the authorities down there as quickly as possible. Make sure that nobody's hurt," and unfortunately there were some people hurt.
As soon as paramedics arrived, we came back into the shop to just close the door because the smoke was starting to blow down the street.
And we ran into another one of the city workers who had been in the park and she was on the phone with her boss and she was crying.
A couple of her coworkers came in, and we sat them down as well.
So we became kind of this gathering centre for the city workers who had been working in behind that building, just as a place for them to sit and sort of gather their thoughts and try to breathe.
We had the paramedics come in and make sure they weren't going into shock, and once their boss came in and he took them out.
It's just that the community pulls together and you do what you need to do.
You guys are heroes.
I wouldn't call us heroes.
We just we did what was necessary in the moment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
