Holladay homeowner apologizes to neighbors for home explosion
Apr 26, 2024, 7:31 AM | Updated: 7:52 am
HOLLADAY — The woman who owns the home in Holladay where dynamite was detonated Wednesday morning is apologizing to neighbors for the damage to their homes and disruption to their lives.
“I want to apologize for the inconvenience; I mean, this was definitely not planned. It was just supposed to be the removal of these shelves full of strange-sounding names, and so I’m sorry for whatever damage they’ve had and sorry they had to be evacuated,” said 79-year-old Teri Wojcik.
Wojcik said she returned to the home Thursday that she and her late husband shared for 51 years before he passed in January. What she found was a handful of EPA investigators still removing chemicals that her husband stored on the property.
“I’ve been impressed with the EPA, and the bomb squad and the Holladay (City) help and traffic control,” Wojcik said. “You know, they got the neighbors safely evacuated.”
She said her husband was a retired chemist from the University of Utah and collected various chemicals at their house for experiments and projects. In final years, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“He was (an) extreme multi-tasker; he had this project and this project, and he would do this and go over to that,” Wojcik said. “He was doing all this fascinating research. It was fascinating.”
Wojcik said she recently discovered a small mercury spill from one of her husband’s projects, which was a homemade thermometer. When she called the health department Tuesday, she said that’s when she realized just how dangerous the situation could become with the other chemicals and dynamite on the property.
“They said if it crystallizes, that can be explosive, so that’s when they called in the bomb squad,” she said.
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