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A tanker carrying liquid oxygen crashed Wednesday afternoon on an outside wall of the Kaiser Permanente medical building north of Santa Rosa, causing a loud explosion and spill that caused evacuation of patients and campus employees. get off near Highway 101 for over an hour.
Evacuation was underway in buildings 4 and 5, where patients were escorted or exited the building to wait for the buses that were transporting them to a safe place.
Paul Lowenthal, Deputy Fire Marshal of Santa Rosa, said the truck involved was a large tanker that was leaking cryogenic liquid oxygen. Photos of the scene showed a Matheson tanker that crashed into the back of the building at 3975 Old Redwood Highway. The accident appeared to be an accident.
Jenna Ausiello, field interviewer for the research division of the Kaiser Regional Office in Oakland, interviewed someone in a conference room when the blast occurred
"It looked like beginning of an earthquake ". "That's what I thought I was coming in. The windows were shaking … it was just a big boom."
His interview subject, a 62-year-old man, described the its like "as if you had a concrete tower and you spilled it into a project demolition."
About 15 minutes pbaded before someone broke into the conference room and said to the pair that they had to leave. When they went out, they saw many patients on stretchers being evacuated from the offices. The man described the scene as a "perplexity".
The authorities continued to tell the two men to move away from the scene, and eventually they joined several others walking south on Old Redwood Highway to Fountain Grove Parkway, where Ausiello was hoping to catch a Lyft.
A bush fire at the scene was extinguished by one of the first arriving fire trucks, Lowenthal said.
Kaiser spokesman Carl Campbell said the entire campus of the clinic on the Old Redwood Highway was locked and that a Kaiser rescue team was working with the police to evacuate the patients and the medical staff.
The first information on the explosion reached the Sonoma Redcom County Dispatch Center at 2:35 pm. Wednesday, a dispatcher reported. Three ambulances, a team of hazardous materials and other fire resources responded.
A Kaiser employee stated that patients who were in the outpatient surgery center of the medical office 5 were evacuated. The center's surgical staff walked south to the main Kaiser campus, two miles from Bicentennial Way, said Kaiser's employee, who spoke anonymously because the employee Is not allowed to speak to the press.
The Kaiser hazardous materials team entered Building 5, the building that was struck by the tanker truck.
The highway was to remain closed between River Road and Bicentennial Way until about 4:30 pm, depending on the time required for emergency crews to clean up the scene, the officer said. Jon Sloat, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol.
CHP also closed Old Redwood Highway between Cardinal Newman High School and Mendocino Avenue, he said. The roadway was reopened at around 4:35 pm Highway 101 was reopened around 4:35 pm.
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