A storm was rolling in that fateful July 2013 evening in Williston, N.D., as Casey Malmquist stood on the back deck, watching the weather and killing time before dinner with a celebratory glass of wine and a cigar.

It was the end of a long run for Malmquist, whose Whitefish construction company had been feverishly building work-force housing for more than three years in the oilfield boom town. All totaled, Malmquist built 56 homes, 44 townhomes and two 24-unit apartment buildings in Williston.

He was ready to turn over the keys to the last round of that housing.

As the wind picked up, Malmquist cupped his hand over his mouth, leaned toward the house and lit the cigar. He had no idea propane gas, likely from a leak somewhere in the new home where he had been staying, was swirling around him, or that later investigators would determine the propane didn’t contain the odorant that typically alerts a person to the presence of flammable gas.

With a stifling whoosh, an explosion and fire enveloped him and his life was forever changed.

Nine months later Malmquist is back at work as general manager of the SmartLam cross-laminated timber manufacturing plant in Columbia Falls and as owner of Malmquist Construction, a Whitefish company known for building high-end homes.

He’s not fully healed, though, and won’t be for another couple of years. Two to three hours of physical therapy each day are now part of his routine, and special pressure gloves on his hands and body are the outward signs of the lingering effects of the burns that covered more than two-thirds of his body.

“It’s surprising how pain persists,” he said.

Malmquist didn’t lose consciousness immediately after the blast and knew he was in deep trouble. His first instinct was to run up a nearby hill and call his wife Natalie.

“My shirt was glowing like a Coleman lantern,” he recalled.

As first responders put him in the ambulance, he told them he needed to be flown to a hospital that specialized in burns.

He remembers one particular detail before the ambulance crew sedated him.

“They were going to cut off my wedding ring and I pleaded with them” not to do that. Much later he learned they saved his ring.

The next few weeks were a blur — and a nightmare.

If life could be equated to a numbers game, Malmquist most certainly would be dead. The old formula for a burn victim’s survival was to take a person’s age and the percentage of the body burned and subtract it from 100 for a ballpark percentage for survival.

In Malmquist’s case, that was 56 for his age at the time, plus 68 percent of his body burned — which left him at a minus 24.

“Ten to 15 years ago I wouldn’t have survived this,” he said. “I have my brothers and sisters in the military to thank.”

Medical advancements made in recent years for the treatment of soldiers injured by improvised explosive devices in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq were used on Malmquist to give him a fighting chance.

Even so, it was a fight for survival. “They basically skinned me,” he said. His wife told him in the aftermath that she never thought a human being could endure what he went through.

The skin from his ankles down was the only undisturbed part of his body.

Malmquist underwent eight major skin-grafting surgeries at Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minn. Each operation lasted four-plus hours.

“I smelled like chemicals for months afterward,” he recalled. “They scalped me and harvested that skin.”

Despite high doses of pain killers, Malmquist remembers the agony of having his dressings changed daily.

“They stapled the fabric on me, into my flesh,” he said. “It’s horrific. If I even hear a staple hitting a metal pan it’s like nails on a chalkboard for me.”

As he drifted in and out of sedation, Malmquist remembers a persistent dream of being buried underground and being terribly thirsty. Looking back, the suffocating feeling probably was due to being bound up in bandages, restrained in his hospital bed. He was in a drug-induced coma for two weeks.

Malmquist also described what may have been a near-death experience as he hovered in a dream-like state.

“I saw that I could go left or right,” he said. To the right he would have to fight with all his might; to the left it was peaceful and serene.

He chose to fight.

He also felt a wave of energy surrounding him that he believes was spurred by the thoughts and prayers of hundreds of people rooting for his recovery. Much later, he learned the prayer circle for him extended as far as Boston, where a group of nuns held him in their prayers. Even a congregation in North Carolina was praying for him.

By mid-August Malmquist felt like he had joined the living again and was able to muster “a normal stream of consciousness.”

It was difficult, even overwhelming to return to work.

And there were things that had fallen through the cracks. When he came back to Whitefish he learned that during his long hospitalization, the mortgage on his Flathead Lake cabin had been sold to a different company and the automatic payments weren’t made, so the lender foreclosed on the cabin. It took a while to get it all straightened out.

“When you disappear from your life, a lot of stuff goes haywire,” he said.

It has been a struggle on many levels for Malmquist to put his life back together.

“The whole victim thing, you can label yourself a victim, but all you do is rob yourself of opportunities,” he said. “We don’t control what happens to us.”

The extensive physical therapy sessions are necessary to keep Malmquist’s new skin intact.

“Grafted skin contracts, it gets tighter,” he said. “If you don’t keep moving and stretching you’ll lose all mobility ... early on my skin would split open.”

Malmquist also is trying to regain the muscle he lost from lying on his back for three months.

He’s thankful surgeons were able to restore his face and now is able to joke that he got “a $5 million face lift.” His medical bills are upwards of $5 million.

“We all have our vanity, I’d seen burn victims,” he said. “By the grace of God” it turned out all right.

Perhaps it's natural to think about what might have been.

Malmquist has considered the possibilities. If he had been inside the home, which was destroyed, instead of on the deck, he likely would have been dealt a fatal blow. If his wife had been there, she, too, might have been killed.

He and Natalie celebrated their first wedding anniversary July 28 while he was hospitalized. Family members commented how she was “living her wedding vows,” for better or for worse, in sickness and in health...

“You find out the true colors of people,” Malmquist said, marveling at his wife’s dedication to seeing him through the worst of it and adding that 80 percent of spouses leave their loved ones who have been so severely burned. For most it’s just too much to bear.

Malmquist and his wife have spent many evenings talking about the accident. That has been a therapeutic haven for him. He sometimes struggles with post traumatic stress disorder. The accident didn’t affect just him, either. It stressed his two grown children and everyone else in his inner circle.

He’s thankful and appreciative of his staff at Malmquist Construction who kept the company running in his absence.

 The routine of work has been a good thing, he added.

“It’s an incredibly uncomfortably injury. You’re constantly aware of your body,” he said. “So to have occupation is great. Dwelling on it would be very destructive. It does change your perspective, though ... it’s great being here.”

And by here, he means alive.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.