In His Hands

11:42 a.m. Time didn’t merely stand still. It completely stopped. I looked out the window in Joan’s office to check on my shipping dock and see if any drivers were waiting to be loaded, and not seeing anyone there, returned to my paperwork. But something didn’t feel right…I turned to take another look, and will forevermore have the next images etched into my mind. What I witnessed and experienced in the next moment was beyond comprehension. Everything came apart at the seams. One minute, the plant is sitting there in its decrepit, run down condition, and the next moment there is nothing there. I watched in horrific amazement as the brick and mortar walls of the plant bowed out, tried to collapse inward, and then blew completely apart. The plant rippled as if it was mimicking the surface of a lake on a breezy summer day, teasing the peacefulness of the day only to cast everything into total chaos. The wall of the plant that had been my shipping dock blew thru the parking lot like a runaway train, steamrolling its way across the road fifty yards away. The roof became a contortionist, turning into a ballerina, gracefully pirouetting in midair several hundred feet up before plummeting back to the remains of the building. A fireball of monstrous proportions bellowed out of the near side of the plant, consuming everything in its path as it headed towards the office where I was. After rocking a pickup truck, the fireball dissipated ten feet from the office window right in front of my eyes. Following on the heels of the fireball was the concussion. The air moved. We have all seen the effects of air moving, i.e. the wind, leaves blowing around, grass swaying lazily in the breeze, but to see the air wrinkle upon itself like a blanket and move is a totally different sight. Everything contorted and twisted into grotesque momentary statues resembling gargoyle inspired architecture from a medieval time period, only to expand and return to a semi-normal state after the air settled back into place. Trees with expansive root systems became projectiles, as if they were fired from a high caliber gun, launching through the air on a search-and-destroy mission. Fire hydrants became useless as they were blown from their mounts into cars and across the street. I watched with increasing horror as the concussive wave from the blast continued its approach to the office trailer in which I was located. The middle trailer where those of us who were plant employees changed into our uniforms was blown onto its front side, only to settle back into place with the back side of the double wide completely destroyed. I threw Joan onto the floor without any warning, shoving her under the desk with not a second to spare as the concussion from the blast hit her office. I was picked up by the blast and blown through the back wall in her office, my left side impacting the wall squarely. My left ankle hit the edge of her desk and split horizontally through the middle of the joint. My left shoulder was shoved further into the joint than normal, and my left hip was injured by the impact. I fell out of the wall beside Joan on the floor as part of the ceiling collapsed on us. 11:43 a.m. I threw the portion of the ceiling, a closet door and a filing cabinet off of the two of us so we could escape her office, only to see that the true horror of the situation far exceeded what we were able to see from her office. All of the windows in the office trailer we were in had been blown to shreds. The front door to the office, made of solid oak, had been blown off its hinges and lay in the middle of the trailer, ten feet from where it should have been mounted. Heidi, one of the ladies that worked in the main section of the office trailer, had been with the EMS and a first responder. She met me at the hole in the wall that used to be our front door while Ross, the vice president, appeared in the area that had previously been his office. He looked at me with eyes wide open from fear and uncertainty, and asked the question that was on everyone’s mind… “What has happened?” 11:44 a.m. Ross, Gary, Joan and I staggered out of the office trailer into a world full of madness and sheer chaos. Everyone’s vehicle now contained parts of the plant, which had become aftermarket additions, courtesy of the plant. The building was completely engulfed in flames with black smoke still billowing up into the mushroom cloud that had formed to serve as a silent, dark requiem to our plight. The powder room, a smallish structure that was used to shake powder from totes into drums, was completely demolished. The refrigerator room where we stored our heat sensitive products also was no longer in existence. The lab, which had currently undergone massive restoration, was unable to retain even a semblance of its structure. Cardboard drums burned as if they were funeral pyres for the plant, while the plastic drums melted wherever they lay. 11:45a.m. After a quick call to my wife to let her know what had happened and that I was still alive, I began to survey the scene. Hollywood couldn’t have devised a more intense moment. We could still hear drums exploding inside the plant, generating a cadence for the death song of the building. Intermittently, a steel drum would over pressurize and shoot skyward, only to explode like fireworks on the fourth of July. Slowly, the plant employees began to make their way away from the building up to the main parking lot. We could hear the sirens wail as emergency personnel began making their way to the disaster at our facility. As the guys grouped together in our parking lot, I initiated a head count, and realized that Bob, our maintenance supervisor, had not emerged from the building. Joan’s husband had turned around immediately and returned to the plant. He called out to me for help, having found Richard lying outside of the entrance to the top floor of the plant. We assessed the situation, and decided we needed to move him due to the fact that a power pole standing drunkenly nearby was on the verge of falling, and the transformer mounted at the top of the pole had begun to arc bright green bolts of electricity. Richard had an injury to his head from the contact when he collided with the ground, but considering the choices of having him electrocuted or taking our chances moving him, we elected to move him. As Joan’s husband and I carefully moved Richard, Heidi had begun doing what she could with the other employees. My cell phone had been ringing nonstop since the explosion, and one of the calls I received was from another brother in Christ, who was the shift manager at one of the grocery stores nearby. He offered to bring down bottled water, paper towels, and whatever else first aid stuff we needed that they had in the store. One of the officers approached us a few minutes later with the supplies. The moans and disbelief of the employees, the screams and shouts of the emergency services crews, the sirens and the sounds of the news helicopters all blended together to play a raucous symphony, an ode to the destructive ballet we were witnessing.