Imagine sitting in your living room on a Thursday afternoon, casually watching TV or reading the newspaper. You just got home from work, and are waiting for your spouse to come home for a nice dinner.

Boom!

Bang!

Blast!

Boom!

Suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, your house explodes. You are dazed, both physically and emotionally. You are now struggling to gather yourself enough to escape the collapsing house as flames erupt in an adjacent room.

One of your children was outside playing, but the other was in the room now in flames. Determined to save your child from certain death, you run into the inferno to save your child.

Narrowly, you and your children escape the home that is now wrecked and ablaze. Sadly, your dog and cat are lost in the fire.

This traumatic experience is similar to some of the stories shared by those in the Thursday natural gas explosion events in Lawrence, Andover and North Andover, Massachusetts.

With some describing a rapid series of explosions that one official described as “Armageddon,” up to 80 homes in the three communities saw fires on Thursday. At least one person died, while several other sustained physical injuries. In total, up to 8,000 either lost their homes or were at least temporarily displaced because of the blasts.

“It looked like Armageddon, it really did,” Andover Fire Chief Michael Mansfield told the Associated Press. “There were billows of smoke coming from Lawrence behind me. I could see pillars of smoke in front of me from the town of Andover.”

It is no surprise that in such a desperate situation, emergency responders from across New England reached out to help. Nashua Fire Rescue sent multiple firefighters and trucks to the scene.

Whether Thursday’s events were truly an accident, some form of negligence, or perhaps even sabotage, is too early to determine at this point. We hope natural gas industry leaders, as well as state and federal regulators, quickly learn what went wrong – and take the necessary steps to make sure it does not happen again.