JESSE^BURKE78 June 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
room while she was talking with her mother on the phone, and
she just ran.
She is terrified but she is safe. Not only safe. Lucky, he thinks. I
just saw a young man crushed by a chimney.
The fire is still in its early stages, but Soto knows there aren’t
enough fire trucks. He says to himself, Accept it now. Don’t let it
drag. Just accept it now that it’s gone.
He kisses his daughter, gets in his cr uiser, and goes back to work,
while his house burns to the ground.
AT 5:33 P. M. , at the request of elected and public-safety officials,
National Grid, the electrical utility, begins shutting down power
to eighteen thousand customers in Andover, North Andover, and
Lawrence. At 6:10, the State Police tweets an evacuation order for
Columbia Gas customers in the three affected towns. But North
Lawrence, across the Merrimack River, is exempted—its gas net-
work doesn’t connect with the over-pressurized segment of pipeline.
Throughout the night, there is an exodus from south to nor th, a pro -
cession of silhouettes crossing the 610-foot Duck Bridge on foot.
Bearing sleeping bags, suitcases stuffed with clothes, whatever they
can carry—valuable things, sentimental things. That old question,
what would you grab in a fire? Heading for one of the two schools
that have been opened as temporary shelters.
At about 8:30, Soto’s commanding officer orders him to go be with
his family. Since the Sotos no longer have a home, a friend puts them
up at a Hampton Inn in Amesbury, about half an hour away. The first
thing Soto sees when he enters the lobby is a big-screen TV, and the first
thing he sees on the TV is an image of fire thickly boiling out of a house.
His house.
Later that night, as he’s tr y ing to sleep in an unfamiliar bed in a
room with gray walls and wall sconces and an ironing board hang-
ing in the closet, he is overcome by pain in his neck and shoulders.
He can’t figure out why. Then Veronica, his wife, reminds him how
hard he had tried to lift the chimney off that boy.
Sunday, September 16
AT 7 A.M., the evacuation order is lifted. The power is restored, but
not the gas. There is still a risk for further fires and explosions. Many
residents return to their homes, but others never will.
At the height of the emergency, the three towns called in every
available off-dut y firefighter, upward of 150 in a ll, as well as the larg-
est mutual-aid response in state history: over 1,000 firefighters and
339 emergency vehicles—engines, ladders, rehab units, heav y-res-
cue squads, and command chiefs, along with an unknown number
of private ambulances. These resources came from as far away as
York, Maine, and Nashua, New Hampshire, and responded to more
than 375 calls in the first eight hours after the over-pressurization.
Lawrence, Andover, and North Andover suffered a total of 141
fires and five building explosions, with one death and at least twenty-
one people transported to the hospital. The casualties might have
been even higher but for the work of a tactical flight officer in a state
police helicopter late Thursday night. While performing over watch
support in Lawrence around 11 p.m., the officer reported that his
FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared) camera had detected “an anom-
aly under the pavement” at Broadway and Andover streets, less than
a mile from the original over-pressurization site. On the FLIR’s ther-
mal imaging, a ghostly white blob appeared to be exerting pressure
upward. Lawrence firefighters rushed to the scene and recognized
another major gas leak. The State Police announced that the flight
officer’s report had “likely prevented another catastrophic event.”OVER THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS Columbia Gas mobilizes 3,000
workers and commits to replacing all of the remaining cast-iron
pipeline in the three towns, forty-five miles, by November 19. The
company is proposing to replace, in roughly two months, the same
amount of pipeline they typically replace in one full year.
In late September, you can barely travel a block in Lawrence with-
out encountering a construction crew in their gray and yellow vests.
On Colonial, a block from where the Figueroas had lived, a construc-Officer Soto
and his wife,
Veronica, are
rebuilding.