Published: 11/23/2006
Day 1: Deaf neighbors evacuated to Beverly
By Tom DaltonStaff writer
DANVERS - Ninety-two-year-old Ida Vernon awakened with a start yesterday morning from the massive explosion at the chemical plant across the Danvers River. But unlike other neighbors around the plant, she didn't hear the explosion - she felt it.
"I felt it in the face," said the resident of the New England Home for the Deaf on Water Street.
Vernon is one of more than 70 deaf residents, many of them elderly, who live at the home and woke up suddenly from the building shaking, windows breaking or pieces of the ceiling falling.
"It was a mess. But I didn't scare. I trust Him," she said, looking up to the heavens and smiling.
The residents were evacuated in buses around 3:30 a.m. and taken to Danvers High School, which served as an emergency center. Many were in wheelchairs and still wearing night clothes. Emergency workers wrapped them in white blankets, and staff at the home organized them by floors and had them sit in large circles.
Two nurses set up a temporary medical station in the school gym to dispense medications. Beverly Hospital also sent nurses to the scene.
A steady stream of off-duty staff and board members of the New England Home for the Deaf showed up at Danvers High during the morning. Using sign language, they tried to reassure the residents, many of whom cried out to them or frantically signed questions.
"They were just telling me they were sleeping and felt the vibrations," said Marvin Sallop of Revere, a board member whose mother lives at the home. "It was enough that it did wake up a large number of them."
Sallop put out calls to agencies across the state for more people who knew sign language.
Steve Sacco, a board member from Wakefield, also came in to be with residents.
"They keep telling me there was a big explosion and they saw broken glass," he said. "I'm told all the windows in all our buildings were blown out."
State Rep. Ted Speliotis of Danvers walked around the gym speaking with residents through an interpreter.
"We're going to stay through this whole thing," he told one elderly woman. "We're not going to leave you."
The New England Home for the Deaf, which is 101 years old, started in a historic, pre-Civil War mansion, which is still on the picturesque site at the river's edge. A brick addition was built in 1925, and a nursing home was added just a few years ago.
