In 1999, I was working late in The Morning Call's Allentown office when it sounded as if something very heavy had been dropped on the building's roof. But it was an explosion at the Concept Sciences chemical plant just over two miles away, near Lehigh Valley International Airport.
On Wednesday, after returning home from dinner in Bethlehem, I was upstairs in my little office and my wife was downstairs when that same sound shook the house. She thought I had taken a bad fall. No, I said, I think it was an explosion.
We went outside to make sure, and the young woman across the street was out doing the same thing. Then we heard sirens over in Allentown somewhere and I was sure something bad was going on there.
It was an explosion, just over a mile away. It leveled two row homes on 13th Street in Allentown and by Thursday afternoon, authorities listed five dead. They said eight others were injured, not seriously, and the accident set two other homes ablaze and caused varying degrees of damage to 43 other properties.
It may be a hackneyed thing to say, but tragedies have a way of bringing people together and the authorities, headed by Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski, displayed a united and dedicated front during the first of two press conferences Thursday.
"Allentonians have a great sense of community," Pawlowski began the briefing, held in the community room of the Gross Towers high-rise apartment building, which also was damaged (mainly broken windows) and was temporarily evacuated. "Allentown is a very resilient city," the mayor promised.
Lehigh County Coroner Scott Grim said the dead victims ranged from a 4-month-old child to a 79-year-old adult. City EMS director Dave Van Allen said 165 people were taken from Gross Towers to the Agri-Plex building at the Allentown Fairgrounds, part of 350 people living near the explosion who were "moved around."
At this stage, no one could say what caused the initial blast, but Fire Chief Robert Scheirer said that after it occurred, "we had gas fires burning up out of the street," and they could not be put out until underground gas lines were fully shut down nearly five hours after the explosion.
Scheirer explained how the frigid weather made it extremely difficult to fight those fires, along with other fires in adjoining homes started by the explosion, with ice created by fire hoses covering the street and everything else.
As Scheirer spoke, we could look out the windows of the community room and see the blast scene, where hundreds of city police and firefighters, along with EMT crews, gas company workers and others, were working on recovery efforts.
Backhoes and other machines gingerly moved pieces of rubble where two row houses once stood, as firefighters continued to douse neighboring buildings with hoses, one of them from the end of a towering ladder apparatus.
Below the hoses, there was a perverse form of beauty. A dozen phone lines stretching across 13th Street had caught the spray and each was draped with gleaming rows of icicles. Nearby, a small tree was coated in a scene out of "Dr. Zhivago." Here and there, colorful flashing lights of emergency vehicles added to the scene.
It was a tragic week for Allentown, but there was a sense that everybody was pulling together, in contrast to what happened after the Concept Sciences tragedy.
The first thing that happened in 1999 was that the company held a press conference and a company representative tried to mislead news media by saying the chemicals being processed at the time were "neither combustible or flammable."
I'm proud to say I am the journalist who caused that press conference to be abruptly terminated when I challenged that claim.
Hydroxylamine, the chemical being distilled, can blow things to smithereens and everyone at that company must have known that when they told the public there was no danger. Also, the day of that blast, a top company executive was warned by subordinates that something was wrong, but ordered the process to continue. Criminal charges were filed against him, but an accommodating federal judge in Philadelphia let him waltz away from them.
At the moment, it is heartening to see everybody in accord in the wake of Allentown's tragedy. We'll see if that mood continues when the nitty-gritty details of this week's accident become clearer.
paul.carpenter@mcall.com 610-820-6176
Paul Carpenter's commentary appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
