TRURO — When Robert Byrnes stepped outside last Friday morning, April 21, he found a typewritten letter in his yard addressed to Todd Henning.
Byrnes lives on Elizabeth Way, a quarter mile or so north of Miriam and Todd Henning, whose house at 8 Harding’s Way was demolished around 11:30 p.m. on Thursday by two explosions and a towering conflagration. The blasts shook homes from Provincetown to Brewster and left heaps of rubble and wreckage where the two-story saltbox house had been. Mattresses and rugs were strewn over branches of nearby trees. According to a press release from the town, the house is a complete loss.
“We looked out after we heard it, and the whole sky was red,” said Patricia Byrnes.
Miraculously, given its force, no one was injured when the main house blew up. Miriam, 73, and Todd, 72, were in a smaller cottage on their property, barely 75 feet away.
“I was asleep, so I woke up to the blast and the shaking and the breaking, and the light of the fire, which is probably what enabled me to see the broken glass on the floor,” Miriam said.
Miriam’s phone was dead so she couldn’t call 911. She remembers ushering her husband out to their car, figuring that driving away was the safest path to take.
“We almost made it out, but there were mattresses and beams and all kinds of things” toward the bottom of the driveway, she said.
Their neighbors Mike and Drew Locke were quickly on the scene. The father-son duo pulled Todd and Miriam from the car and led them away from the fire, Drew said.
Firefighters from across Cape Cod began to arrive soon after that. Tankers were summoned from Wellfleet, Provincetown, Joint Base Cape Cod, Sandwich, Mashpee, and West Barnstable, which sent two, according to Truro Fire Chief Tim Collins.
Because the area is wooded, containing the fire posed a challenge. Howard Karren, who lives nearby on Resolution Road, described the explosion as “the loudest and most powerful shock wave I have ever felt in my life.” He feared that a brush fire would be ignited.
But the fire crews managed to contain the blaze. Collins estimated that they used 50,000 gallons of water to douse it.
The cause of the fire is under investigation by the state fire marshal’s office, according to Collins. The extent of the damage is making the work more difficult.
“It’s just utter destruction,” Collins said, “so to try to pinpoint the cause and origin is going to take some time.”
For now, the property is taped off so that state investigators and insurance adjusters can do their work. The Hennings were told they will be able to recover items from the site in two to three weeks, said Todd and Miriam’s son, Ari Henning. Truro’s building dept. did not respond to questions about inspections of nearby houses before the Independent’s deadline this week.
“The fire didn’t just start,” said Drew Locke, who saw the conflagration break out from his home on Perry Road. “It blew up, and then when everything settled, the fire started.” He and his father were already there when the house exploded the second time.
“I get chills thinking about it,” Drew said.
At least one of the explosions has an explanation. “I can confirm a propane tank did in fact rupture,” Collins told the Independent on April 24. “We’re not sure if that was the cause or a result of the fire.”
Miriam and Todd spent the rest of Thursday night at a neighbor’s house and have been staying with friends off Ryder Beach Road since then. The cottage got its electricity and other utilities through “the big house,” as the Hennings called the demolished home, so it is not currently livable.
Ari and Anna Henning, two of Todd and Miriam’s three children, flew in from the West Coast to help deal with the loss of their childhood home. Their parents bought the property in 1986 from the Perry family after selling their cottage colony on Bradford Street in Provincetown. The house at 8 Harding’s Way was a 1960s-style ranch, which they remodeled into a two-story gable-roofed home.
The Hennings had been renting out the big house from May through October, Miriam said, since building the adjacent cottage in 2007. Ari said that because the cottage is easier to heat and moving back and forth between the two houses had become a hassle, his parents moved into the cottage full-time.
“It’s obviously very sad to have the family home demolished,” Ari said.
Although most of the Hennings’ everyday belongings were spared, a lot of beloved objects went up in flames. Todd had raced vintage motorcycles professionally for decades. “There was a lot of memorabilia related to that and actually some important motorcycles,” Anna said.
The Hennings are also mourning Miriam’s art collection, most of which was stored in the big house.
She and Todd used to own Todd’s Repairs (now Outermost Automotive), the auto shop in Provincetown’s East End. They sold it last December, Miriam said.
On the wall of the men’s bathroom in the garage was a striking mermaid — nine feet by seven, Anna estimated — painted by a local artist. “When he didn’t have enough money to pay for his car repairs, he would do things like that,” Miriam recalled. When the Hennings sold the shop, they had the wall removed and framed. It was destroyed in the fire.
“I like to collect things that have a personal meaning to me,” Miriam said. She also lost art acquired during motorcycle-related escapades to England, a favorite painting of the dunes, and another of Corn Hill Beach.
“I keep remembering things that are gone,” she said.
Amid all the losses, the fire left a surprising array of things barely scathed. “We were really surprised that so many paper objects survived completely intact,” like a Polaroid photograph of her preschool class, said Anna. The photo, she speculated, was likely in a box in the attic and was ejected cleanly from the house.
On Friday morning, as fire brigades continued to monitor the site, a neighbor came across a folded stack of papers in her yard. Now returned to Miriam and Todd, the pages turned out to be blueprints for the no-longer-standing house, penned in thin, precise blue lines. Except for two tiny holes singed into its edge, the paper is weathered only by age.
“It’s amazing with all that broken glass and everything that we weren’t hurt in any way,” Miriam said.
