UPDATE: Another mystery boom

8:35 PM: They happen more often late at night or early in the morning, but several readers have reported hearing a big boom in the Charlestown/Genesee area within the past half-hour. All we know is that there are no fire or medical calls anywhere in the area – no power outages, either (one person thought it might have been a transformer) – if you know exactly where it happened and/or what it was, hopefully you already have called 911.

11:11 PM: In a comment below, Stephanie says the blast was from fireworks.

Stephanie July 21, 2017 (9:36 pm)

Unfortunately this was just my neighbor and his friend being irresponsible with fireworks. After the blast shook the neighborhood, multiple neighbors confronted the house in question

WSB July 21, 2017 (10:05 pm)

Thank you for the update. When there’s no fire/medical/electric call, that’s usually my suspicion, but that doesn’t excuse the fact that it startles and freaks out so many people (and animals). One person messaged that the last time they heard a boom like that, it was the Greenwood natural-gas explosion that ravaged a business district. – TR

Ws July 21, 2017 (10:15 pm)

Yes this boom was extremely loud. We also thought something had exploded.

Kc July 21, 2017 (10:51 pm)

I wonder if it could be down at the steel mill

what they call a furnace explosion

Mark Baron July 22, 2017 (8:49 am)

First, The source was answered and explained almost an hour before your post.

Second, explosions in the furnace generally aren’t that sharp unless they result from a sealed container and we screen those out pretty carefully. Most of our explosions result from water in the scrap in the winter. Given that it’s the middle of summer our scrap is pretty dry and we’ve not had a good explosion in some time. When we do have large explosions they don’t have enough decibels for the sound to travel that far.

I don’t speak for or represent Nucor but I do work there in the maintenance shop.

JC July 21, 2017 (11:46 pm)

I live on California in the junction and it was loud here. To me, it sounded too loud to be fireworks but that is just my take. We get a lot of echoing here so it is hard to pin down the direction.

lvbebe July 22, 2017 (7:10 am)

I didn’t hear the boom last night though around 11 there was an entire fireworks show that we heard from our house in Admiral. I was one of the texters last week with the other mystery boom around 4am, that was definitely not fireworks and sounded like a piece of metal expanding or something, almost like a cold pan in a heated oven. I figured it was probably from the shipyard or steel mill but my first thought was also an explosion similar to the one in the Greenwood District.

Enid July 22, 2017 (9:54 am)

The morons who use fireworks have been making bigger and bigger homemade bombs the last few years. It’s bad enough that fireworks bans are not enforced, but there should be criminal charges attached to combining them for larger explosions. It’s out of control.

Sorry, comment time is over.