Witnesses stunned by sheer force of explosion

Witnesses said they were stunned by the sheer force of the blast.

“It knocked me down, it knocked me back. It was like the whole road just picked up,” said resident Cheryl Marich, whose home was destroyed and whose husband was fighting the blaze.

Another witness, Bill Bohannan, told the Waco Tribune-Herald: “It knocked us into the car. . . Every house within about four blocks is blown apart.”

In the hours after the blast, residents wandered the dark, windy streets searching for shelter. Among them was Julie Zahirniako, who said she and her son, Anthony, had been at a school playground near the plant when the explosion hit.

The explosion threw her son four feet in the air, breaking his ribs. She said she saw people running from the nursing home, and the roof of the school lifted into the sky.

“Hit the ground, hit the ground,” Zahirniako heard a neighbour yell.

“The fire was so high,” she said. “It was just as loud as it could be. The ground and everything was shaking.”

William Burch and his wife, a retired Air Force nurse, entered the damaged nursing home before first-responders arrived. They split up, searched separate wings and found residents in wheelchairs trapped in their rooms. The halls were dark, and the ceilings had collapsed. Water filled the hallways. Electrical wires hung eerily from the ceilings.

“They had Sheetrock that was on top of them. You had to remove that,” Burch said. It was “completely chaotic.”

Erick Perez was playing basketball at a nearby school when the fire started. He and his friends thought nothing of it at first, but about a half-hour later, the smoke changed colour. The blast threw him, his nephew and others to the ground and showered the area with hot embers, shrapnel and debris. “The explosion was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. This town is hurt really bad.”

Witness Kevin Smith said he had just climbed the stairs to the second floor of his home when he felt the blast.

“The house exploded. It was just a bright flash and a roar, I thought it was lightning striking the house,” Smith said.

“I felt myself flying through the air about 10 feet, and it took a second or two to realise that the roof had caved in on me so I knew it wasn’t lightning.”

Jason Shelton, 33, a father of two who lives less than a mile from the plant, said he heard fire trucks heading toward the facility five minutes before the explosion and felt the blast as he stood on his front porch.