It was around 9:30 Wednesday morning when disaster struck in the JP Donmeyer INC. parking lot in East Hanover Township, Lebanon County.
“I mean, everything rattled.”
Neighbors Taryn Weatherholtz and Morgan Hollis say they are used to hearing noise coming from the parking lot.
This time, they say, was different.
“Ut was really loud. It definitely scared me.”
State police say 69 year-old Michael Floyd of Harrisburg was driving a truck tractor to a back parking lot to hook up a trailer.
“Another person that works for the company, he was driving a van down there to essentially pick him up and drive him back up to the building,” said Trooper David Beohm with the Pennsylvania State Police.
That person was 65 year-old Stephen Miller of Lebanon.
As Floyd got out of the truck to get into the van, the van exploded, killing Miller immediately and sending Floyd to the Hershey Medical Center with non life-threatening injuries from the shrapnel.
Now, investigators are looking at factors that may have contributed to the explosion.
“So the van that he was in, they call it their maintenance van or something to that effect, it had acetylene and oxygen tanks in it, air compressor, the welding equipment in it. Something you would use where big trucks are at,” said Trooper Beohm.
As they sift through the debris, they are also looking to neighbors for information.
“There were cops, they went to all of our houses around here, asking if we saw anything, or if we had cameras on the property to catch footage of it,” said Hollis and Weatherholtz.
State police are leading the investigation, with assistance from the ATF, bomb squad, and OSHA.
They do not believe any suspicious or terroristic activity was involved.
It could be another week, they say, before they have any answers as to what happened.