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05:13:2004 Entry: "Ann : Explosion Aftermath/Ghost House."
Explosion Aftermath/Ghost House.
This made me really sad.
Yesterday Stan and I took what is now our daily walk past the site of the explosion. On the grass by the curb by the house across the street from the site, one of the houses that sustained structural damage and now only has limited entry allowed by the residents, we found a large house plant. I'm not sure what it is yet...umbrella...large...schefflera...anyway, it's bigger than anything we have, even bigger than our tree philodendron. But we couldn't resist. We took it and gave it a home. I guess maybe the plant suffered some blast damage and wasn't good looking anymore to its previous owners. I guess we didn't care. It was a plant.
I awoke last night and could sort of remember what the house looked like that blew up. I'm not sure if my memory is all that accurate, but it came to me. It was two stories, but it was a newer, i.e., built in the 1940s house (as I it was reported somewhere in some media), so it probably wasn't as much of an architectural loss to the neighborhood as I originally had thought. I think it had a low-pitched roof, sort of post-bauhaus, pre-bilevel style. Frame, but with aluminum siding. I think it was grey or neutral, although the wreckage shows a turquoise color. This is confusing. I think the windows were situated more towards the corners of the house. And I think it had windowboxes. It sat lower than the steep-pitched brick 2-story house to its northeast (I think, unfortunately, that one is a total loss, which is such a shame, such a pretty house) and much lower than the old three-story 1844-era frame house to its southwest, (which also might have to be torn down as well), but not as low as that weird little oddity two doors down to the southwest that didn't appear to sustain any damage at all! The explosion was like a tornado, selectively choosing random victims. Tall houses fared the worst. Since we live on one slope of the hill and the explosion was on the other side of the hill toward the top, that is why I believe it sounded like something fell on our roof from the trajectory of the sound waves...amateur physics assessment that it is. Our house was also protected enough from other houses higher on the hill which was why we didn't have any broken windows...just cactuses which fell off the windowsills (and they're doing fine).