FORT WORTH, Texas — A recovery journey is still underway for several injured victims who were inside the Sandman Signature Hotel in Fort Worth when an explosion in the hotel’s basement rocked downtown.
Six months have passed, but new details continue to emerge little by little.
WFAA has obtained new surveillance footage from the inside of the hotel. It shows several people sitting at the hotel’s bar at 3:30 p.m. on January 8th as an employee prepared drinks. Moments later, a massive explosion blew windows out and sent people running.
Twenty-one people were injured during the blast. It's been six months, but the recovery journey is still a work in progress for more than a dozen people injured and the nearby community.
Lisa Jackson, the owner of La’Creamian has looked out at dumpsters and barricades in the aftermath of the explosion. Her business, which opened six months before the explosion, has struggled ever since.
“All I see is destruction,” Jackson said. “There was a time I cried every day, every time I looked out. It was cause no one could see me and I couldn’t see them.”
Jackson feels a sense of hope and relief after the city of Fort Worth announced Eighth Street is set to reopen at some point later this month. For Jackson, it’s a chance for customers who have been rerouted for months to return.
“It has been so very long, a long journey to get to this point and we actually thought the street wouldn’t be open till next year,” Jackson said.
Jackson praised the city for supporting small businesses like hers through small business funding following the explosion. It’s the reason her ice cream shop has managed to keep its doors open.
As she prepared for the once-busy road near her business to reopen, injured victims who have filed lawsuits have hit a bump in the road.
Court documents show the defendants, including Sandman Management Inc., Northland Developments Inc., and Musume Fort Worth have been granted a stay and will move to transfer all pending Texas cases to a multidistrict litigation pretrial court.
According to Kyle Findley, an attorney with Arnold & Itkin representing several of the injured victims, the move to multidistrict litigation puts a halt to all pending civil lawsuits.
Findley said one judge will now oversee all cases and consider all findings. Whether the cases will remain in Dallas County is undetermined.
The move will delay the cases, Findley said.
“We want these cases to move forward,” Findley said. “Certainly it delays the case momentarily while the cases are consolidated into one court for the purposes of conducting all of the pretrial litigation matters before the cases are released for trial.”
Findley said several of his clients have been unable to return to work and are still suffering from their injuries.
“They’ve all suffered multiple injuries, and that’s not something you expect when showing up to work in a downtown city,” Findley said. “Some are doing better than others but there's some that have catastrophic injuries… some that have injuries that probably will never be the same again, and that’s what makes this whole event as traumatic as it is.”
The Fort Worth Fire Dept. has yet to release a definitive cause, although federal investigators said a gas explosion caused the injuries.
“I’m thankful no one lost their life,” Jackson said.
Federal investigators have closed their investigation into the explosion without any answers or actions.
Last week, WFAA learned an investigator with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) missed months of work after the blast because of emergency surgery. A new investigator never stepped in, and now the statute of limitations for fines has passed.
OSHA and the Department of Labor have said they’re looking into the issue.