Explosion was just "like an earthquake"

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WWLP) - It felt like an earthquake, even to people miles away. Hundreds of frightened people didn't know what to immediately make of what they felt at the moment of a massive gas explosion in downtown Springfield .

Men who live at the Rescue Mission shelter on nearby Taylor Street were still shaken by what they had experienced during their dinner hour.

“We were having dinner, when all of a sudden we were about to finish dinner,” said Tony, who is homeless. “It blew all the upstairs windows out, and we thought it was a bomb. Everything was shaking and everybody hit the ground, they were crawling.”

Eric Andrew came downtown to see for himself what had happened. He had been visiting a friend in the Hill-McKnight neighborhood.

“I thought it was an explosion that area, but it was all the way downtown. They said the building just vanished,” Andrew said.

“It rocked the house like an earthquake.”

Others told 22News they had similar fears that an earthquake had hit western Massachusetts. Those people were at home at the time in communities such as South Hadley and West Springfield.