When you've got a major gas leak like that everybody working around it has to turn their radios off and everything else off because any kind of little spark would ignite it.

We speculate that someone smelled the gas leak when they awoke, and fiddled with the (burner) knobs, which created a spark.

Days Inn didn't have much damage. It was mostly contained to the truck. We did evacuate the south side of the hotel and kept water on it until we could get foam hooked up so we could put out the fire. We had to use 30 gallons of foam to put out the fire.

We don't know how the fire started. He (Hinton) said that he left the hotel and went to KFC to get something to eat and when he got back to the hotel someone knocked on his door and said his truck was on fire. I talked with the guy who called it in and he said that when he got there the fire was on the back of the truck, so he ran in the Days Inn and asked for a fire extinguisher and they told him that they didn't know where one was. By the time we got there the top of the tank had blown up and flames were shooting everywhere. The truck was totally engulfed.

He had some bullets and paint cans in the back of the garage and the heat and fire caused them to go off causing multiple explosions.

When we arrived on the scene, the home was totally involved.