Jordan Bass was walking along Seventh Street in downtown Fort Worth Monday afternoon when he heard a bang from across the street. More than hearing the explosion, Bass said, he felt it in his chest, a thump that reverberated inside him. It took a moment before he realized what had happened.

“At first I thought it was something benign,” Bass said.

Then he looked to the other side of the street. He saw the smoke. He saw the debris on the ground. Then he saw the debris still in the air, and coming down fast. He took cover under the green awning outside the vacant office space he was next to and pulled out his phone to start recording. He still hadn’t fully registered what had happened.

But when he saw people running across the street and through the parking lot toward the Sandman Signature Hotel, Bass said he started moving that way too.

Around the same time, Doug Kascir was watching and videoing from the ninth-floor conference room in the Fort Worth Club building. He saw people rushing out of the Sandman Hotel into the debris-strewn streets in the heart of downtown Fort Worth and smoke rising from the building.

The people ran away from the rear entrance, some visibly gasping for breath and others crying, most coated in a thick layer of dust and soot. One woman ran to a car in the parking lot and put a hand on the hood to steady herself as she bent over and coughed.

Kascir also saw Bass, wearing a bright yellow beanie, head toward the hotel. As he approached, Bass said he saw survivors making their way out of the building. One hotel employee was getting to his feet, having been apparently blown by the shock of the blast into a valet stand. Thickly covered in white powder, the man’s face was bloodied. Bass almost headed his way before he saw others rushing to the man’s aid.

So he headed toward the building, where authorities would later say a fire was burning and people were trapped in the basement.

Through a hole in the wall under an awning for passenger drop-offs, Bass and another man saw survivors of the explosion trying to decide if they would jump the eight feet to the ground.

“I was telling them, ‘Jump, I’ll catch you,’ “ Bass told the Star-Telegram.

Smoke and dust still pouring out of the building, the two men threw their arms in the air toward the survivors. One after another, the survivors sat on the edge of the opening and made the jump, with Bass and the other man catching each of them and helping them find footing.

“I kind of bear hugged them as they were landing on me,” Bass said.

Bass said he knew the survivors were terrified and wanted out of the building, he said, because they didn’t hesitate.

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Kascir could see it all from the conference room in his offices. At first, he thought the sound was an exceptionally close crack of thunder that rattled his office windows. Then a coworker called out from the conference room.

“No, man, it’s an explosion,” he remembered his coworker calling out.

From the conference room he opened up his phone and took a video of the chaos below, which had more than 24 million views early Tuesday morning. He watched as bystanders rushed to the building, moving around the rubble and calling out for people inside even before emergency services arrived on scene.

“Look, it blew something clean out the front door,” Kascir said in the video. “That was a hell of an explosion.”

Police were the first emergency responders who Kascir saw arrive. They ushered people, including Bass, away from the building and a few went in through the blown-out door. Fire crews and more police officers poured into the area, rushing into the building and shutting down roads.

“I was feeling help mode,” Bass told the Star-Telegram. “It didn’t feel right leaving just yet.”

Kascir, too, was eventually evacuated from the club building as authorities shut down streets surrounding the hotel. He got in his car and spent 15 minutes waiting to get out of the garage before he was able to head home. When he arrived at the office before sunrise Tuesday morning, Kascir said it was almost surreal to look out the windows and see the hotel windows all dark and debris still strewn in the parking lot and street.

Bass was walking by the next day when he saw the man he was working with to get people out of the building, talking to TV reporters. He went up after the interview was done and shook hands with the man and traded phone numbers.

Bass said the man doesn’t speak English, but that didn’t matter. In a situation like that, they both knew what they needed to do and it was easy to work together.

By the end of the day, authorities said the explosion, likely natural gas-related, injured 21 people, with one in critical condition and four in serious condition. MedStar took 14 people to three area hospitals and one other person showed up at a hospital on their own.

The damage to the 20-story building constructed in 1920, home to the recently renovated Sandman Hotel and a separate restaurant in the basement, hasn’t been fully assessed yet.

Fort Worth Mayor Mattie Parker said at a news conference that her focus is primarily on the survivors of the explosion and hoping and praying for a full recovery, but that when the time comes she and the city will work with the building’s owners to do everything possible to preserve the historic building.