A Thud, News
By Frank Warner
The (Allentown, Pa.) Morning Call

We heard a thud at 8:15 p.m. Feb. 19.

It was a boom beyond the north wall of The Morning Call's Allentown newsroom.

It sounded like the bang we occasionally hear from the pressroom when, we imagine, someone has dropped a 2,100-pound roll of newsprint.

But this bang was louder, and a shock of compressed air pinched the walls and shook the ceiling.

"What was that?" reporters and editors murmured under their breaths, not expecting an answer, not suspecting the thud had killed five men two and a half miles away.

"Was that thunder?'' asked news assistant Miriam Kiss.

We had no answer for about 60 seconds. Then the phones started ringing.

"We've got a huge blue cloud in the sky," said one caller. "Something big exploded.''

The early callers were from Allentown, Bethlehem, Catasauqua, Easton and Shimerville. They all heard a blast nearby.

Assistant city editor Bob Wallace took a bundle of calls in quick order. "They all think it's in their neighborhood," he said less than five minutes after the explosion.

A minute later, a police radio reported something raining on the cars on Route 22, "and it isn't water."

A few of us editors ran up to The Call's roof. From a distant point northwest of us, an eerie, expanding cloud had snaked past the Lehigh County Prison and was creeping across the night sky toward the PP&L building. Otherwise, the sky was cold and clear, full of bright stars and the sliver of a waxing moon.

Photographer Denise Sanchez rushed out of the newsroom for a car. Another photographer, Tom Volk, already was on the way to the scene; from the Staples store two miles west of the blast, he had witnessed the bright blue flash.

Phone callers still were guessing where the noise came from. "There's a cloud over Stahley's bar" on Hanover Avenue, Allentown, more than one told us.

Assistant city editor David Venditta sent Yung Kim and Kurt Bresswein, the only news reporters on duty, out toward Stahley's.

As they left, other callers were suggesting the explosion was at Allentown State Hospital or Lucent Technologies in east Allentown, or at the Tarkett flooring plant in Whitehall, or at Chemlawn in the industrial park north of the city.

At 8:35 p.m., a police radio announced, "a structure explosion at Lehigh Valley Industrial Park III, Hanover Township, Lehigh County."

At 8:40, a fireman radioed an address: "749 Roble Road . . . 7-4-9 Roble Road."

Finally, we had something solid, an address, the where of the news story. Over the next five minutes, that address must have been shouted out a dozen times, news assistant to reporters, reporters to editors, editors to photographers, and back again.

A Lehigh County emergency official soon reported that Aircraft Landing, an Allied Signal subsidiary, had the 749 Roble Road address. "Explosion at Aircraft Landing."

That report might have generated the next wave of telephone calls. "The country music radio station is reporting a plane crash near the [Lehigh Valley International] Airport," a caller told a news assistant.

Several reporters called the airport. No plane had crashed.

At 8:50, the emergency radio announced a "Level 1 Disaster" and advised that the Industrial Park's neighbors stay indoors.

"There goes A1," said wire editor Rick Sample, who had been preparing a wire story about the Kosovo peace deadline for our Feb. 20 front page, A1. He knew a far more interesting story was shaping up.

Local editor Gary Andrews and slot editor Jane White told us copy editors we'd better move faster on the editing and headline-writing for the local stories already in, because we needed to be ready for the breaking disaster news.

Venditta telephoned Managing Editor Elaine Kramer at home. "We've got a disaster, a Level 1 disaster," he told her. She said she was coming in immediately, and she was here that fast. The adrenaline was flowing.

Reporters and editors who already had worked a full day shift called in and volunteered to help. Venditta enlisted them and other reporters, and Wallace and photo editor Denis McElroy directed every available Call photographer to 749 Roble Road.

At 8:55, the explosion was declared a "Level 2 disaster," meaning there were more victims than originally estimated.

We still didn't know what had happened. We had the when and the where. The what remained something big but sketchy.

In the next minutes, police radios told us that PP&L, UGI and the county Hazardous Materials Team had arrived at the disaster scene.

We heard that MedEvac was flying one victim to Lehigh Valley Hospital, and there were at least five other victims.

Reporters Kim, Bresswein and Ron Devlin had reached the scene, too. They radioed to tell us they were struggling to persuade fire police to let them move closer to what appeared to be the remains of a large building. Reporter Christine Schiavo was in Catasauqua, asking what the neighbors had seen.

At 9:25, emergency officials uttered the name of a substance that might have been involved in the explosion: hydroxylamine sulfate. Reporter Rosa Salter began digging up the background on the chemical.

At 9:30, rescue workers reported that someone heard a cry for help from the smoldering rubble. The radios went silent as they listened for another cry that did not come. For the rest of the night, Joe McDermott would compile reports in the newsroom from seven other reporters in the field. Schiavo reported on the neighbors, and finance news reporters Susan Todd and Mariella Savidge covered the business angle.

By 9:45, Sanchez had photos of an Industrial Park security guard who was drenched in chemicals from the blast. Her Morning Call car was coated in the same synthetic mist.

Then reporter Kim, whom a fire policeman accidentally directed to a cornfield with an excellent view of the blast scene, led Sanchez to the vantage point. Volk would follow out later.

Meanwhile, photographer Cesar Laure was snapping shots from a Cessna airplane. Jason Brunges, a private pilot from Bethlehem, had taken Laure up at McElroy's moment's notice.

At 10, reporter Elliott Grossman went out to cover the emergency officials' news conference at the Post Office in the Industrial Park. At 10:15, the officials said they had discovered the plant was not owned by Aircraft Landing, but by Concept Sciences Inc., a company that moved into the Industrial Park only four months earlier.

Reporters scurried for information on the company. News assistant P.J. Brennan found a list of Concept Sciences products, including hydroxylamine, on the company's Internet Web site.

CNN phoned to ask what we knew. The Philadelphia television stations asked where they should send their helicopters. Chopper 6 and the others were on their way.

Authorities now were saying they suspected the chemical that exploded was hydroxylamine, which Concept Sciences manufactured as a component cleaner for the semiconductor industry. Officials weren't sure which chemical rained from the blast plume.

Larry Printz, a Morning Call artist, sat at his MacIntosh computer assembling a map of the blast site. Managing Editor Kramer and photo editor McElroy huddled around Printz to study the cartography, accurately placing 749 Roble Road just north of Route 22 and east of the Lehigh River.

McElroy proposed that our Saturday tabloid be covered with one photograph, front and back, if an appropriate disaster photo came in. Kramer and Printz agreed, and Kramer notified the sports editors that their back page on high school basketball might be bumped for a wrap-around picture.

Now the written stories were being filed: Nine injured and perhaps four trapped under the pulverized building.

News editors helped sharpen the stories. They also checked facts and wrote headlines. "Explosion Rocks Valley," was the A1 Line.

For the first edition A1, Laure's aerial shot of the explosion's aftermath was selected. The photo was powerful, but it wasn't the right composition for a wrap-around.

Then, at 11:55 p.m., McElroy saw another picture emerge from the photo processor. It was Volk's dramatic shot of a rescue crane over the hulking wreck of a building. This became the wrap-around cover in our final Feb. 20 editions. At about 1:15 a.m., as second edition was running off the press, Kramer called a quick meeting of editors to outline the news follow-up for the Feb. 21 paper. Many more questions needed answers. In the meantime, we'd keep reporter Christian Berg at the scene.

At 2 a.m., McDermott made his last changes to the main story. Where his original report said three or four men remained "trapped in the rubble," he now wrote more ominously that they were "unaccounted for." Considering the facts, the word "trapped" sounded too hopeful.

We didn't know yet that five men lay dead in the ruins of Concept Sciences, and we wouldn't know until around 6 a.m.

But a lot of good journalists produced a lot of good journalism that shattered night. And every day since, The Morning Call has continued to pull together the most complete account possible of a disaster that literally shook the Lehigh Valley. It's too bad the story doesn't have a happy ending.

Firefighter's in an aerial bucket survey a smoldering building following a powerful explosion at the Lehigh Valley Airport Industrial Park Friday Feb. 19, 1999 in Hanover Township, Pa. Five men were killed and 14 other people were injured in the blast at the Concept Sciences Inc. chemical plant. (AP Photo/The Morning Call, Tom Volk)