Charlie Blackmer
Features Editor

Photo by Chris Clark

Twenty one is a young age at which to have your life ripped apart, your belongings incinerated, your body and memory burned and scarred.

Just over a year ago, on March 19, 2013, CMU student Kolby Gimmeson was blown out of his living room by an explosion caused by a natural gas leak, which quickly engulfed his 7th Street and Orchard Avenue home in flames.

The house adjacent to his then caught fire and also burned to the ground, while nearby Tope Elementary was evacuated.

Now 22, Gimmeson, a senior studying Business Management and Marketing, says, “Life is a little more serious” than it was before the house explosion.

“I’m a little more grown-up, a little more cautious,” he said. “The way I see things has changed. Before, I was just careless, and I didn’t give anything too much thought. But now I feel like I take things more seriously.”

Gimmeson suffered third-degree burns on his face and arms from the explosion, and while he bears no obvious physical scars, he says he still deals with a bit of emotional scarring.

“Small flames still kind of sketch me out once in a while,” Gimmeson said. “[When] grilling, just connecting the propane, I want to make sure I have it screwed on tight enough. Any time I smell gasoline or any type of gas at all, it sketches me out a little bit.”

Immediately following the explosion, in which Gimmeson’s then-roommate Casey Zabel and friend Roberto Lopez were also injured, Gimmeson sought counseling to help combat some of the feelings of loss he experienced.

“It helped a little bit,” he said. “But it was a weird situation, like I was out to sea with no boat, no paddle. All I had on were swim trunks, and I had to get back to shore somehow.”

“I had everything I needed before the house exploded,” Gimmeson said. “Everything was set  [for me] to start my career: different paperwork, resumes. Then the house blew up, and I had to hit the reset button. It was like, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to start from here.’ I don’t remember what I did before that. My dream was kind of wiped away. I lost a lot of motivation because I had tried so hard to get to where I was. Why try so hard again if all that might happen again?”

In an attempt to compensate for at least their material losses, Gimmeson and former roommate Jordan Pierson (who was not home at the time of the explosion) quickly filed a civil lawsuit against the City of Grand Junction and Xcel Energy. However, neither Gimmeson nor Pierson could confirm if there are other parties involved on either side of the suit.

“We’ve both kind of got to walk on eggshells concerning that,” Pierson said, referring to the pending lawsuit. The City of Grand Junction could not be reached for comment.

Pierson, also 22, has since left CMU and now lives in Greeley, where he works for Precision Drilling, an opportunity for which he says he “thanks my lucky stars everyday.”

Though Pierson was not present during the explosion, he lost quite a bit in the ensuing fire: a picture of his grandmother who had passed away, “a lot of letters” and, “I know it sounds stupid, but a coffee table. It was given to me by someone special.”

“[The explosion] kind of took everything we had and flipped it upside down,” Pierson said. “New friendships were created, old ones dissipated. Roberto (who was injured in the blast) became a good friend of ours. Kolby and I were close before, and I feel like we got even closer.”

“Life’s gonna take a turn no matter what, but that was a big one. It turned everything around. Kolby and Roberto kind of kept on the same track, and I went a different way,” Pierson said.

Gimmeson is set to graduate in December and is looking forward to nabbing a marketing internship or a job with a big company, though he has travel on his mind as well: “Fiji, Canada, really anywhere I could get some good camping and fishing in.”

But first, Gimmeson has to make sure he has everything in order.

“I’m not as spontaneous as I used to be,” he said. “I have to learn everything about a situation before I go.” Gimmeson says before the explosion, were friends to call him to go camping, he’d be there, no questions asked.

“Now it’s like, ‘Where are we going, who’s exactly going, how long for?’ I just want to make sure to be safe out there, compared to the carefree me of before.”

cblackme@mavs.coloradomesa.edu