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| Officials begin painstaking search for cause of explosion in Danvers »
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
By Kay Lazar and Kathy McCabe, Globe staff
DANVERS - Some residents said it sounded like an earthquake. Others thought it was an assault from above. The explosion at a chemical plant this morning sent a wave of terror through this neighborhood of single family homes along the Danvers River.
Peter Jonikas, 59, woke up to what he said "sounded like a car crashing into my house." The explosion blew out four of the windows in his Appleton Street home.
"There's a lot of glass inside my house," said Jonikas, who is worried about the weather. "It's going to rain, and I'm going to have damage inside the house."
On Bates Street, Holly Gould feared that the blast was assault from outer space.
"When I woke up all I saw was flames coming over my head and I thought a meteor had hit the house," Gould said. "I woke out of a dead sleep and saw embers and flames. The roof was coming down."
Her three story apartment building lies in ruins. "The whole back side of the house is gone," Gould said. "We lost both of our cars."
Peter Muthua, 24, the night counselor in a group home for mentally disabled adults, described a harrowing escape with three patients.
"Everything was falling on me," said Muthua, who was at the group home on Bates Street. "The roof. The walls. I thought someone hit the house with a car."
Trisha Lynch, 22, stood outside Beverly Hospital after the blast wrapped in a blanket. She and her fiance were asleep on the second floor of a home on Bates Street -- about 150 yards from the explosion.
"I thought a plane had crashed," Lynch said.
Posted by the Boston Globe City & Region Desk at 04:14 PM
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