Explosion at central Texas hospital forces evacuation of at least 12 people, reports say

At least 12 people were evacuated after an explosion Tuesday afternoon at a hospital in Gatesville, police said.

The explosion occurred at about 2:30 p.m. at a construction site at Coryell Memorial Hospital, according to the Austin-Travis County EMS. Gatesville is about 40 miles west of Waco.

Four people reportedly were injured in the explosion, including one critically, a hospital spokesperson told KBTX-TV.

The patients evacuated were transported to other area hospitals. The building partially collapsed, forcing emergency responders to work an active fire, KCENTV.com reported.

A spokesman for the Texas-New Mexico Power Co. told The Associated Press that the explosion knocked out power across a large portion of the city. Initially, about 900 homes and businesses in Gatesville were without power.

Most of the power had been restored just before 6 p.m., according to TNMP spokesman Eric Paul.

"The exceptions are a small handful of customers very near the hospital complex. Those customers probably will be restored Wednesday," Paul said in an email statement. "We can’t say for sure that the incident at the hospital caused the outage, but that’s our working assumption. We also may need to turn off power for a small number of customers this afternoon/evening to restore power to the water well. That work should wrap up by 8 p.m."

The outage did not affect the entire town of Gatesville, only one part of it, including the hospital area, Paul said.

Patients from two nearby nursing homes also were evacuated and taken to a church and other nursing homes in the area, KCENTV.com reported.

Coryell Memorial Hospital is a community-owned health care organization in Gatesville, according to its website.

This story was originally published June 26, 2018 at 5:53 PM.