Man killed in gas explosion
at Grantham tennis court

One man was killed and two more seriously injured in an apparent gas explosion yesterday at an outdoor tennis court at Grantham’s Eastman community.

Friends identified the deceased as Eastman resident Jim Owen.

Owen had stopped breathing and had no pulse when rescue workers found him buried in snow about 15 feet from the wreckage, said Eastman resident, Dr. Scott Irvine, who helped in the rescue effort.

“We found him under four or five feet of snow,” he added.

Two other men hurt in the explosion, one identified as Mort Shea and the other unidentified, were being treated at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon last night and are expected to survive, police said. A nursing supervisor at the hospital did not have their conditions last night.

A fourth man in the explosion, whose name was unavailable yesterday, escaped serious injuries.

The explosion happened at around 2 p.m. while the men were clearing snow from the elevated tennis court with shovels and a snowblower, said Eastman general manager Ken Ryder. The men were all residents of the community, he said.

A propane system that heats the court probably caused the explosion, he said.

“We assume it’s the propane system underneath,” Ryder said.

Fire Chief Bob Seavey said the court, which stands about four feet off the ground, was blown into about three sections. The blast sent two of the men over a 12-foot fence.

“It was quite an explosion,” Seavey said.

When firefighters arrived, only a small flame was coming from a propane line.

“We shut the gas off at the tank and just let it burn itself out,” Seavey said.

Irvine, who lives about 75 yards from the tennis courts, said he arrived at his Greensward Drive home moments after the explosion. His wife and children heard the boom and thought something had hit their house and crashed through the roof.

“It sounded like a tree hit our house,” said 9-year-old Dorothy Irvine. “It shook the house.”

Irvine said he ran out back to see what had happened and saw the commotion through the trees at the tennis courts.

“There was a mangled mess—the remnants of what was once an outside tennis court,” said Irvine, a Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center anesthesiologist.

“People were running around all wide-eyed and crazy looking.”

One of the injured men was face-down on a piece of the court with a broken arm and leg, and Irvine said he prepared to fly with him to Dartmouth-Hitchcock. As they were headed for the helicopter in an ambulance, he heard over the radio that another man with worse injuries had been found.

“I jumped off the ambulance and ran to the spot where they found the guy,” he said.

But CPR and other rescue efforts performed in the ambulance could not revive Owen.

“He died at the hospital,” Irvine said.

About 30 rescue workers from Grantham and nearby Springfield worked at the scene, and the State Fire Marshal’s office was called to investigate the explosion last night.

According to its Web site, Eastman is a 3,500-acre residential and recreational community about 50 miles from Concord off I-89. A mixture of seasonal and year-round residents live in the community’s more than 800 houses and 336 condominiums. The area boasts a two-mile lake, 13 tennis courts and a golf course as well as miles of hiking, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing trails.

Eastman resident and recreation committee member Jack Blessing said he plays tennis and golf with the three explosion victims, who he said are all retired.

He said Owen, who had lived in the community a couple of years, was very well-liked and active in the community.

“He was a very intelligent man,” he said. “He was the assistant treasurer of our men’s investment club.”

Blessing said the four men, all members of a group who regularly play paddle tennis, had volunteered to shovel the platform tennis court yesterday.

“It’s just a sad occasion for everyone, and of course it’s a closely-knit community and most of us know each other,” he said. “These were good friends of mine and good friends of lots of people.”