Blast jolted responders into action

In Danvers, Fire Captain Doug Conrad was trying to catch some shut-eye.

The rookie of the department, William Todd Redford, was working on a presentation for a class he is taking at North Shore Community College.

Five miles away, across the town line at the Middleton fire station, Lieutenant Thomas J. Martinuk was about to relieve the firefighter manning the front desk. He happened to glance at the digital clock on the television cable box. It was 2:47 a.m.

At that moment, the silence was shattered.

"It felt like, sounded like, a large rumble of thunder," Martinuk said of the Nov. 22 blast at a Danversport chemical plant. "The whole building shook. We knew something big had happened. We weren't sure what. We didn't wait for dispatch. We went automatically. We didn't even know exactly where it was -- at first we thought something had happened at Eastern Propane -- but we found it."

The scene they encountered was like something conjured up by Hollywood.

An entire row of houses appeared to be engulfed in flames. The back of the houses on Bates Street had been destroyed by the blast, and the fire at the chemical plant was visible through their front windows, casting a dismal glow over the neighborhood. Downed power lines threatened scores of residents who had poured out onto the street.

"Unless you were there, you couldn't even fathom it," said Redford, who graduated from the Massachusetts Firefighting Academy in September. He had responded to medical emergencies and more than a few false alarms, but the blast was his first fire.

His main mission that night: search and rescue.

"When we got there, we knew right away that our primary goal was to get people to safety," said Redford, who was on Danvers' 10-member crew of first responders. "There were people wandering the streets, the walking wounded. Most were in their pajamas, some in less than that. All of them were illuminated by the fire."

The blast destroyed the building shared by CAI Inc., an ink manufacturer, and Arnel Co. Inc., an industrial paint producer. In all, some 70 houses and businesses were evacuated. Hundreds of residents were left homeless. The cause has yet to be determined.

One Bates Street woman had cuts on her feet. She had walked over the remnants of her bedroom window, not realizing in her shocked state that it had shattered in the explosion. One man had cuts on his head. Several Danvers police officers were running into damaged buildings alongside the firefighters, without any protective gear, searching for residents trapped in their homes.

"We were going into houses, searching them one by one," said Danvers Fire Lieutenant Richard "Ace" Chase, a 27-year veteran of the department, who worked with Redford escorting people out of the area. "You'd open up a bedroom door and see nothing but sky. The back of the house was gone. The room seemed to be sitting in midair."

From a little higher up, the devastation was indescribable, said DeWayne Sullivan, a 10-year veteran of the Danvers Fire Department. He was standing on the turntable of Engine 1, about 8 feet off the ground, and had a clear view of Bates Street.

"We have friends who live there," he said. "It was an eerie feeling, to be looking down at the devastation and at the same time hear the captain describing it."

As he worked at his perch beside the Danversport Bakery on Water Street, adjusting the direction of Engine 1's ladder pipe to ensure that the water hit its intended target, Sullivan heard Conrad calling for backup.

"I need police officers to evacuate this area," Conrad was telling Danvers Emergency Center dispatchers, as detailed in digital recordings of 911 calls and radio transmissions released by the town Tuesday. "We have a large propane tank still in the process of venting. Give me as many ambulances as you can down here. We have multiple injuries. We probably have four or five houses that had the back part of their building blown out."

There were no deaths or serious injuries as a result of the blast. "It was absolutely amazing that no one got killed," said Martinuk, a paramedic and commander of the Middleton crew that night. "Everything went about as smooth as it could have. Even the weather was on our side. The winds were blowing in the right direction. And the building's location was good, right on the water. It helped to contain the fire."

For nearly 45 minutes, from the time of the blast until about 3:30 a.m., the phones at the Danvers Emergency Center, housed in the town's police headquarters, rang without a moment's rest. Luckily, the two dispatchers on duty had help. Immediately after the explosion, the officer who had been manning the station's front desk rushed into the center to work the phones, and two off-duty dispatchers showed up minutes later to offer their assistance.

Together, the five of them handled more than 200 phone calls from frightened North Shore residents and monitored the radio traffic of area emergency personnel. Danvers, unlike most towns, uses a single emergency center to dispatch calls for police and fire.

"The sound was deafening, just deafening," said Joseph DeBernardo, one of the two dispatchers on duty when the blast occurred. DeBernardo usually works evenings, from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. That night, he had switched shifts with an overnight dispatcher.

"Everything had been quiet right up until the explosion, routine patrols, that's about it," said DeBernardo. "Then I heard the blast and looked out the window and saw a fireball."

Within seconds, chaos ensued. Wailing sirens and the shrill ring of telephones can be heard on the 911 recording, providing a glimpse of the commotion at the scene and in the emergency center. The telephone lines were constantly tied up, forcing some calls to be bounced to dispatch centers in neighboring towns; Beverly alone fielded more than 100 calls.

"We try to keep notes, to track what's going on, or we type things into a computer file," DeBernardo said. "Usually, we include time stamps, but that night we just wanted to write down whatever we could, so we could reflect back on the notes, you know, make sure we were notifying people about what was going on and seeing when something needed to be done."

As the dispatchers handled radio calls from firefighters and police, they also tried to comfort distressed callers and determine whether they were hurt. They had to juggle calls quickly, to try to keep the lines clear.

Caller: "I'm trying not to bother you. I'm 86 years old. I'm sitting in my chair; and Jesus, all of a sudden, the whole damn house shook."

Dispatcher: "Are you hurt?"

Caller: "No. No. No. I'm OK. It scared the hell out of me. I'm still kind of a little nervous. Can you tell me what happened?"

Dispatcher: "No, I can't. I have to go right now."

On and on it went.

Dispatcher: "911. Line's recorded. May I help you?"

Caller: "Did you hear that explosion?"

Dispatcher: "A loud explosion? Yep, we have it."

Reflecting on what happened following the predawn explosion, the firefighters who were first to arrive on the scene agree that despite the lingering questions about the cause of the blast, there's a simple lesson to be learned from what happened: In the face of catastrophe, remain calm.

"Through it all, Doug Conrad stayed extremely calm," Martinuk said. "It set the tone for everyone. We were able to remain focused, to let our training take over and basically go on autopilot and just do what we had to do."