Christine Choiniere doesn’t remember the time. All she knows is she was asleep in her room at Warwick Terrace housing on Elmwood Avenue when she was awakened.

“It happened so fast I didn’t even know what was happening. It was like a bomb went off,” she said Friday.

She went to investigate and discovered the tank to her toilet was cracked open. She slipped on the wet floor and fell against the bathtub and then, after surveying the damage, called maintenance at the Warwick Housing Authority. A crew showed up and replaced the toilet tank that night. It was March 14.

The following day she was in such pain that her neighbor brought her to Kent Hospital. They took x-rays and performed a CT scan determining she hadn’t broken anything. That didn’t lessen the pain. On Friday she was still cautiously moving around and sitting straight up so as not to aggravate it.

The Beacon learned of Choiniere’s “exploding toilet” from another Warwick Housing Authority tenant who had read the April 18 Beacon and its account of the recall of the model 501B Flushmate. The Flushmate consists of an oblong tank that is mounted inside the porcelain toilet tank. It pressurizes the water inside the tank, thereby reducing the volume of water needed to flush when a button is pressed on the tank top.

Flushmates are used in all 481 Warwick Housing Authority units. However, only the 26 units at Shawomet Terrace, the newest complex, are outfitted with the serial numbers of the recall.

The Beacon learned of the situation from Harry Fogell, a Shawomet Terrace tenant who read of the recall in Consumer’s Report and checked the toilet in his unit to see if it was the model being recalled. It was.

The Consumer Reports story said there have been 1,453 reports of bursting units in the U.S. and Canada, resulting in 23 injuries.

Housing Authority executive director Michael Lyckland said Friday the company has been contacted and replacement Flushmates will he coming. Thus far, only one has arrived and that was used to replace the Flushmate in Fogell’s unit.

But apparently, the recall did not apply to the toilet in Choiniere’s unit. In addition, Lyckland said he got a different story from the maintenance crew responding to her call. He said they found the Flushmate intact, although the sides of the porcelain were knocked off.

Choiniere said maintenance personnel returned to her unit to take out the “push button” tank they had installed the night of the incident. They replaced it with a conventional side flush tank. All was good until Choiniere received a bill for $209.60 for the new tank and the overtime cost of responding to her unit after hours.

“So when I move out do I take the toilet with me?” she asks. “So, Warwick Housing doesn’t supply toilets?”

Lyckland said he’s going to look further into Choiniere’s story and check to see if the Flushmate could have been the cause of the damaged tank. He notes that fixtures in units get broken and, when that happens, tenants are responsible for the cost of repairs. His impression is that Choiniere fell and that’s how she hurt herself, although he doesn’t know if there was water on the bathroom floor, which would have been the case if the Flushmate exploded.

Choiniere questioned the bill without any satisfaction. “They acted like I took a sledgehammer to it,” she said.

A graduate of Pilgrim, Choiniere has worked most of her life. She was a waitress at TW Rounds and the Barnsider at Warwick Mall, both of which are no longer in business. She also worked at the Warwick Public Library. In 2005 she underwent an operation removing three tumors from her spinal cord and five years ago she underwent a brain operation.

She’s has no doubts her toilet tank exploded, which now raises the question who’s responsible for its replacement.