Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-06)

The DAY

The TOWN

BLEW U P

Last fall, a sudden gas-pipeline

accident destroyed dozens of homes

near Boston: 141 fires, five explosions,

21 serious injuries, and one death—

in a single evening.

By NATHANIEL PENN

This is the story of how such a thing happens—

and the heroic response that day.

TR

EV

OR

PA

UL

US

Thursday, September 13, 2018

35 Chickering Road, Lawrence,

Massachusetts

Around 11 A.M.

A KNOCK ON THE DOOR wakes up Omayra Figueroa. It’s Leonel.

On the front stoop. Of course. Leonel is an honorary Figueroa. His

mother often jokes to Omayra about moving his bed there.

Shakira, Omayra’s twenty-one-year-old daughter, throws on

some clothes and joins him outside in the sun. It’s beautiful out,

70 deg rees.

The Figueroas—Omayra, her three children: Shakira; Chris-

tian, twenty; and Sergio, seventeen—moved to this working-class

neighborhood of Cape-style single-family homes in 2013. It sits just

around the corner from a strip mall and the Registry of Motor Vehi-

cles, but Colonial Heights feels like its own little world, less than

a square mile, green and still. Oak trees arc over hushed streets.

Over eighty years, Colonial Heights has become increasingly

diverse—Latin American and southeast Asian names showing up

on mailboxes alongside the Irish and Italian ones.

Thirty-five Chickering Road is the first property that Omayra

has ever owned—her castle, she calls it, big and bright, filled with

plants she spends time tending to. She got a basketball hoop for her

boys, and solar panels on the roof. She loves gathering family and

friends for boisterous barbecues in the backyard, with Puerto Rican

specialties she cooks herself and lots of music. She has maintained

the house’s siding in the preppy, two-tone color scheme found on

many suburban homes in Massachusetts, a deep gray trimmed in

white. The house makes her feel happy and safe: It has withstood

sixty-two years of New England weather—blizzards, ice storms,

floods. It can hold the Figueroas, she figures.

At this time of day, the elm tree next to the front walk casts the

entire house into shadow. The pink rosebush beside the brick front

stoop waits for the sun. Shakira slides out onto the stoop, and there

she sits with Leonel and a friend who’s accompanied him today,

talking about things she won’t remember later.

Bare feet up on the stoop, no need to do any thing or be any where,

just blinking yourself awake in the sun, like a cat.

POPULAR MECHANICS

JUNE 2019 PAGE 71