The Sugar Explosion: 6 Months Later

It was six months ago tonight the Imperial Sugar Refinery exploded, killing thirteen people and injuring many more.
Some still remain at the Augusta Burn Center recovering.     
News Three's Alice Massimi was the first to bring us images from that night, and she's been following the story since then.
Many of us will remember where we were when the explosion took place. Some of us felt the ground shake, others saw the bright illumination in the sky.
But while most of us experienced the tragedy from a distance, watching it on television, some saw it first hand.

Think back six months to a night that frightening...
“We could feel the walls shaking and feel the compression in your chest.”
Unreal...
“They told me they needed every single ambulance in the region to respond.”
Horrific...
“I saw bedlam. I saw everyone running, ambulances were trying to get in fire trucks were trying to get in.”
But words truly fail, because nothing could have prepared these men for what they heard, saw, and felt as they drove down Oxnard Drive.
“You could see flames coming up from the silos and people kind of staggering around like zombies,” recalls Detective Steven Holmes with the Port Wentworth Police. 
Victims were rushed to emergency rooms by ambulance and chopper.
“When I arrived there was probably already 100 gurneys lined up outside,” says Dr. Jay Goldstein, the Head of the Emergency Department at Memorial Hospital.
“I was the first person to see these patients as they were coming off of the ambulance and they were more worried about their family members and their friends then they were themselves,” explains Goldstein.
Fire Chief Greg Long and Mayor Glenn Jones waited for word on friends working inside the plant that night. 
The last to be found among the rubble was a longtime friend of both, Tony Thomas.
“Tony was a guy that could always make you laugh and joke and he was just a one of a kind,” says Jones.
Today, at the entrance of the plant, thirteen flags stand in remembrance of the lives lost.
“Sometimes I look at the flags and it keys back that night sometimes I look the opposite way from it,” says Chief Long.
Long says he's still haunted by the images.
“Every time you drive down the road you see the lights you see the trucks, the ambulances. I don't know what I am going to go to be able to get rid of that,” says Long.
 “It was something like I had never seen in my life so it was hard to get my head around it,” says Detective Holmes. 
Jones says he's tried to close the door on the horror and concentrate on the positive.
“What I am proud of is that night the community opened up its doors and said we are here to help in anyway we can,” says Jones. 
They say it's prayers and hope that have driven this small town ... Prayers for those lost and injured and hope that nothing like this will ever happen again. 

Life may be getting back to normal for most of the employees of imperial sugar but three men still remain at the Augusta Burn Center.
“We at least knew he got out and felt like he wasn't hurt very bad we had no clue had bad it was till we got there,” recalls Karen Seckinger the mother of one of the burn victims.
Friday night on News Three at eleven we tell you the story of one of those men, through the eyes of his family.