Esparto residents describe fireworks explosions, saying "it felt like a bomb went off"
A property owner who lives less than half a mile away from where the explosions happened had his front windows blown out, saying it sent all his animals and workers on the property into a panic.
The big boom was followed by dark clouds of smoke, fire and debris flying. The blasts sparked fires on the ground, engulfing nearby houses.
"The shockwave was really alarming and damn near almost knocked the wind out of me and pushed me to the ground almost. It was really overwhelming," said Stephen Gordon, who works and live at Cadena Farm.
Gordon was working in his garden at Cadena Farm, less than half a mile away from where the blasts were popping off, blowing out his front window and shutting off his water and power.
"Once you saw the plume and kind of chaos afterwards, that's what it's been since then," Gordon said.
"My husband works graveyards, so he was asleep and I was in the kitchen and it felt like a bomb went off," said Liz Steiner, who lives nearby. "It felt like something crashed into the house or something blew up. Well, something did blow up, we didn't know what it was."
Steiner and her husband live about three miles away from the facility, and say the explosions damaged some of the stucco on their walls.
"It was terrifying and then the explosions continued," Steiner said. "They kept going off, the big ones and small ones, and we could see the fireworks exploding from our house."
"People out here definitely come together when they need to," Gordon said. "This was no different for sure."
Devastating Pyrotechnics, the warehouse that caught fire, said that it will cooperate with the investigation in a statement posted to its website.
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