A chemical plant outside Boston blew up with a roar so thunderous that people thought it was an earthquake or a plane crash, destroying two dozen homes in the tightly packed neighborhood but causing only minor injuries.
The fiery blast flattened the CAI Inc factory, a manufacturer of solvents and inks, at around 3am on Wednesday, knocking buildings off their foundations, shredding roofs and shattering windows in neighboring Salem. The explosion could be heard more than 30km away.
"I was in bed and then next thing I knew, I was on my feet. I saw the flames and grabbed my clothes. My first thought was that an airplane crashed, but then I thought it was too early for that," said Paul O'Donnell, an aircraft mechanic.
Nearly 90 homes were damaged, with roughly 25 wrecked beyond repair, but only 10 of the more than 300 people believed to be in the neighborhood were hurt and their injuries were minor, authorities said. The plant was empty at the time.
"The miracle is you have the equivalent of a 2,000-pound bomb going off in a residential neighborhood at night when everybody is home, and no one's dead and no one is seriously injured," Governor Mitt Romney said.
Officials said it could take weeks to determine the cause of the explosion.
Most of the damaged homes were in view of the plant and some stood right across the street. The neighborhood is among the oldest in the city, dating to the 1700s, with a mixture of business and homes because it was settled before modern zoning rules.
Residents in the most severely affected areas would not be allowed back into their homes until at least today, Danvers Fire Chief James Tutko said at a press conference on Wednesday night.
Firefighters from 30 cities and towns battled the blaze.
In one condominium across the nearby Crane River, the blast was so strong it bowed a woman's bedroom windows, sucked her curtains out and then returned the unbroken glass and frames to their original position -- with the curtain tops attached to the rod inside but the curtain bottoms fluttering outside in the breeze.
"A lot of people never knew it was there, that's how benign they were," said a neighbor.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
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Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
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