GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. - An explosion on Christmas morning in downtown Nashville, Tennessee sent families running in fear. Buddy Gainey and his family live in Grand Rapids. He was visiting his daughter in Nashville for Christmas where he heard the massive explosion in his rented vacation condominium.
"At 6:30 a.m. the explosion goes off and it's just one of the loudest sounds I've ever heard combined with the entire building shaking and glass and debris crashing into the apartment," recalls Gainey. "I jumped up, could smell smoke immediately so I thought it could be a fire so I yelled to my girls we got to get out of here."
Once into the streets, Buddy says police officers were screaming for them to run out. He and his wife Michelle Berends Rainey, also of Grand Rapids, we captured on police body camera footage running into the streets and escaping the city.
"We got to the street level and it was like a war zone. My wife and my daughter didn't have shoes on," Gainey says. "We're all in shock and really kind of frozen there. You can definitely hear in my voice that I was in shock and terror, and luckily our car was parked across the street so we could get out of there."
On Facebook, Buddy shares this detailed description of the experience, along with pictures of aftermath in the devastated city of Nashville. Today, he says, he is grateful to be alive.
"We definitely have so type of mental trauma," Gainey says. "I just keep reliving the moment in my mind, it comes at different times. At different times you'll get emotional, and out of the blue you'll have a breakdown. But we know that God has control and that we'll get through this."
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