The aftermath of a school explosion

January 13, 2012  Science room mishap prompts HAZMAT response at David Douglas High

August 12, 1985 Science Class...

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:

The aftermath of a school explosion

NYTIMES Magazine, February 27, 2005. "The Rescue Artist," by Deborah Solomon. Below is an excerpt from an article about Jonathan Safran Foer, Author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. 

… "Astoundingly, he insists that his development as a writer was shaped less by his parents and by his genetic endowments, less even by the novelists and poets he loves, than by a single event: the Explosion, as he calls it. ...

[His email] began: “Firstly, let me say that these are, quite literally, the first words I’ve ever written about this. Ever.  Literally not a single world.” Foer told me later that he had composed the message at home, at the desk in his cluttered basement workshop, his thin face streaked with tears. The letter recounted, in some detail, the event that split the idyll of his childhood in two: the years before Aug. 12, 1985, and the years after.

That bright Monday morning began innocently enough. Foer, a boy of 8, was attending a summer program at Murch Elementary, a pubic school not far from his home. The first lesson of the day was a chemistry project, and in an act of  nearly unbelievable carelessness, the teacher laid out bowls of combustible materials.  The goal was to make sparklers...

Read more: The aftermath of a school explosion

Includes The Washington Post article: $11 Million Awarded for Boy Burned in School Lab