As Donations Pour in After the Greenwood Explosion, Displaced Neighbors Feel Forgotten

Hal Miller, 60, stands on a stairway outside of his apartment building in Greenwood. The remains of the March 9th explosion are just across the alley. Ana Sofia Knauf

An explosion rocked the Greenwood neighborhood in North Seattle on Wednesday, March 9. The blast, caused by a natural gas leak, destroyed Mr. Gyros, Neptune Coffee, and Quik Mart, which stood at the 85th St. & Greenwood Ave. block. Now, there is only a mass of debris left in their stead.

But lost in the clouds of dust, rubble, and neighborhood fundraising efforts relentlessly covered in the media (yes, even here) were the residents of the building just across the alleyway from where the explosion happened.

The building is best known for housing Gorditos Healthy Mexican Food, a neighborhood favorite, but it is also home to 13 tenants who live in the single rooms and studios above the restaurant. Shannon Ramirez owns the whole building, runs Gorditos, and serves as the tenants’ landlord.

Hal Miller, 60, lived in the northwest corner of the building for four years. When the explosion demolished three businesses kitty-corner to his apartment, Miller said only a few picture frames fell off of his walls. When he ventured into the hallway to see what had happened, he ran into a neighbor who lived in the corner of the building directly facing the site of the explosion. The neighbor’s window shattered, but didn’t do any structural damage to the room. According to Miller, they were unharmed, but shaken. When Miller looked out of that neighbor’s window, he saw the building was leveled.

“It looked like a warzone,” said Miller.

Miller stands in the building's shared kitchen and laundry space. The force from the explosion blew the window's frame out of the wall. Ana Sofia Knauf

Just a few doors down, an unoccupied unit had part of its ceiling come down and its windows blown in. Several other neighbors with apartments facing the explosion weren’t home when it occurred. In the building’s shared kitchen, chunks of the window frame were scattered in the sea of glass on the tile floor. More glass from broken windows and light fixtures crunched underfoot as tenants headed down the stairs to evacuate.

“I thought, well, they’re probably going to make us evacuate at least for awhile. I figured the worst that can happen was we’d have to stand on the street corner for a couple hours and then we’d get the all-clear,” said Miller. “Instead, the fire department came by and said we’d have to get out, period. So then I grabbed a few things and called my friend to get me.”

Miller and his 12 other neighbors wouldn’t be let back into the building even to get a change of clothes for the next three days. Although he was able to stay with his friend in Monroe, Miller considers himself homeless.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, the Greenwood community rallied together to organize fundraisers supporting the employee’s of Mr. Gyros, Neptune Coffee, and Quik Mart and the Phinney Neighborhood Association's (PNA) Greenwood Relief Fund. PNA had received nearly $145,000 in donations.

Miller and his neighbor, Jason Timss, 47, saw money pouring in to help the neighborhood, but because of conflicting reports they weren’t sure if they would receive any of it. So, while their neighbors downed beers two blocks up Greenwood Ave., Miller said that, although they had sympathy for the businesses destroyed, he and his neighbors feel forgotten.

"We all got lost in the shuffle because most people walk by this building and don't expect there's anybody living here. ...It looks like an old, run-down looking building, but there's a bunch of us," said Timss, who lived in the building for nearly five years.

Timss said he scoured local news sites and didn't see anything about his building's tenants becoming homeless. "We're here at ground zero, the businesses were closed [and] it sucks what happened to them ... but we live here," he said.

Lee Harper, executive director for PNA, said she understood the tenants frustrations and acknowledges that the communication process between her organization, emergency services, and the city's Human Services Department had been unclear.

“There’s a lot of information swirling around and a lot of it is conflicting. That’s what happens. It’s this ever-evolving communication and [PNA has] never done this before,” Harper said. “We had no way of calling people until they started calling us on Friday. …It’s extremely difficult to find out who lived in an apartment that may or may not have been evacuated because that information is not public.”

Harper also said PNA's Greenwood Relief Fund was never intended to go exclusively to businesses affected by the explosion, and that some of the money will be used to support tenants of the building. PNA has assembled the Greenwood Relief Advisory Board, which will meet for the first time next week and figure out exactly how the donations will be divvied up, she said.

Jason Timss lived in the apartment building about Gorditos Healthy Mexican Food for nearly five years. His life is now packed up in a U-Haul truck. Ana Sofia Knauf

The weekend after the blast, tenants were allowed go to their apartments to gather clothes and personal items, but couldn’t stay because of damages. The building still had no power and required a number of repairs to make it habitable. The costs of the repairs fall on Ramirez, the building's owner, because the damages were on private property, a city Department of Neighborhoods representative said.

Tenants received aid from the Red Cross, which aimed to make sure all tenants had food, clothes, and somewhere to stay. The organization assigned each tenant a caseworker to help tenants find longer-term housing solutions and cut them checks, but according to Timss, the checks didn’t arrive until five days after the blast. By then, Timss said he had already spent $200 for a week’s worth of clothes for his warehouse job in Mukilteo.

On Tuesday, tenants were told they had two days to vacate their apartments because contractors assessing the damage were concerned about airborne asbestos particles in the building, said Ramirez, the building owner. Asbestos was a popular insulation material in the early 1900s, which is when the building was constructed, and is now known as a cause of mesothelioma, a type of cancer.

There were rumors that they would have to find somewhere to stay for two to eight months, Timss told me as he packed his apartment’s contents into a U-Haul on Wednesday.

As of Friday morning, Ramirez said contractors estimated that building tenants will be able to move back into their units between the ends of April and May.

But, at the end of the day, that still leaves 13 residents without a home.

“Everyone who lived there was dealing with something or other that made money tight,” Miller wrote in a message. “That building was all most of us could afford, [which] will make finding a new place very difficult.”

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