A house exploded in Durant last week, burning a man including all of the hair off of his head.
Twenty-one-year-old Aiden Palmer was still being treated for third-degree burns at Parkland Hospital in Dallas as of press time this week.
The Durant Fire Department responded at 3:20 p.m. Jan. 21 to a home at 108 W. Georgia St. and all of the occupants had exited the house before firefighters arrived. According to a DFD report, a neighbor said she smelled a gas odor about a week before the explosion and that she had contacted Oklahoma Natural Gas. Another neighbor said there had been a strong odor of natural gas in the area for the last several days.
Firefighters put out the fire and they found multiple dogs that were alive in the back room and one dog was deceased, according to the report. Choctaw Nation Fire Marshal Andy Kenyon arrived and the scene was turned over to tribe’s fire marshal’s office. ONG also arrived to began an investigation.
The explosion and fire gutted the home.
Zeda Bledsoe, Palmer’s mother, described what happened. She said that she was napping when her youngest son and her partner Stacy Wooten came home from the store.
“When they got here, my partner asked my son Aiden to light an incense and when he lit the incense, it blew Stacy into my room and caught his head on fire,” Bledsoe said. “I jumped up and looked and all I could see was my baby’s head on fire and him screaming, ‘Please help me. Help me please,’ and it took forever.
“I couldn’t get out of the bed because I’m on oxygen and I tripped over my cords and fell. I couldn’t get over there fast enough. So, I was yelling for Stacy to put him out. Stacy’s over there putting him out, trying to put him out. Fi- nally get him on his hands and knees and she got him out, but every time she would put his head out, it would light back on fire and it did that like five times. We finally got it out and we got him outside.”
Bledsoe said her 12-year-old son was lying in the hallway and so scared.
“We got him out, I got out,” she said. “I sit in the doorway right there because I couldn’t breathe. My 31-year-old son come out and he was like, ‘You got to move where you can get out,’ and they pulled me out of the doorway and I landed on my knees and then my 31-yearold son came out.
“Someone said, ‘Oh, the dogs.’ The dogs were in the backyard and so my 21-yearold, the one that was on fire, heard it and he jumped up and ran out of the gate and run back there and started grabbing the dogs and throwing the dogs in the car and he just has third-degree burns.”
Approximately 20 percent of Palmer’s body has burns including his upper chest, head and back.
“His back is really bad, his arms and his hands,” Bledsoe said. “He has no hair and that just devastated him. He had long hair.”
According to Bledsoe, cream was being put on his back, so hopefully, he won’t require skin grafts.
The family was staying at a hotel and hoped to be in a house this week.
Wooten also recalled what happened.
“I laid my groceries down, turned and asked Aiden to light an incense and I went to go back into the living room and it blew, just boom,” Wooten said. “It threw me backwards and my kid comes running in with everything on fire.”
When asked if she thought the explosion was the result of a gas leak, Wooten said, “I’m assuming it was a gas leak, yes.”
A GoFundMe page for the family has been established by Michelle Bledsoe.
