PEABODY — A real mystery is unraveling in the city of Peabody.
On Tuesday, a loud noise and vibration rocked parts of the city at approximately 11:30 a.m.
Peabody Police Chief Tom Griffin was at the department headquarters on Allens Lane when he not only heard the noise, but felt a definite vibration.
“It sounded like a big disturbance. I don’t want to use the word explosion because it scares people, but there was a boom and you could feel it, even in the police station,” said Griffin. “Usually what happens is someone will call and say something happened at my neighbor’s house or my house, but that didn’t happen. Nobody reported anything except there was this noise and vibration.”
Griffin said residents from the Goodwin’s Circle area to Brooksby Farm to the downtown area experienced the incident, but calls to the Lynn, Lynnfield and Salem police departments and area fire departments failed to uncover the source.
The department then contacted the Rousselot company, which is located next to the police station, but representatives said they were unaware of any incidents on its property.
“We also contacted Aggregate, the quarry in West Peabody, but they said there was nothing going on there,” Griffin said. “We checked to see if any permits had been issued that might have involved demolition or blasting, but we found nothing there either.”
Later that night, the department deployed explosive-sniffing K-9s in an effort to uncover the source or locate explosive devices that might have been placed in wooded areas. That too came up empty.
“The theory was that if no one in the neighborhood called or saw anything, maybe something happened in an isolated area, but the dogs didn’t pick up on anything,” Griffin said.
Tuesday night, the Peabody Fire Prevention Bureau notified residents through a Facebook post that read, “unfortunately we have been unable to locate the source of those explosions. We called the BC Weston Observatory. They were not earthquakes. There is no blasting in the city.”
By 10:30 a.m. Wednesday, the police department posted a message on Facebook alerting residents that law enforcement drone teams and EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) canine units would be searching the area to assist the department’s investigation to determine the origin of Tuesday’s loud noises, advising the public that if “they see a law enforcement canine, please do not approach or interact.”
“When we didn’t turn up anything, on Wednesday we decided to use some drones, again, to search the area on the theory that maybe somebody was out there doing something that they shouldn’t have been doing,” said Griffin.
“Right now, we are working with members of the Lynn and Peabody fire departments and other police departments, including Tewksbury and Waltham, which have drone units.”
Griffin said the department has received numerous phone calls from people sharing their theories on what might have happened and that the investigation is ongoing.
“We’d like to get to the bottom of this to determine the cause of it, so we know the next steps to take going forward,” Griffin said. “It doesn’t appear that anybody got hurt, but I don’t know what it was and I don’t know what it was. In the next case, someone may get hurt as it was a pretty big disturbance and was even felt all the way downtown.”
By the end of the day on Wednesday, the cause was still undetermined.
“We’d like the public to know we will follow every lead we can until we come to a reasonable conclusion, which maybe we can’t figure out, but we will continue to inform the community when we have more to add,” Griffin said. “The next step Thursday will be to check in with the meteorological experts to see if it could have been weather-related.”
