Smoke from Painesville Township plant fire worries residents

PAINESVILLE TOWNSHIP, Ohio -  

It started out as a typical morning for Phil Murphy, the owner of Lake County Radiator, and Ryan Kenenske, of Ultimate Car Care, who both share a building on North Ridge Road in Painesville.

That changed at about 11 a.m. Thursday when a fire started at Hardy Industrial Technologies on Hardy Road.

“It sounded like a truck blew a tire on Route 2,” Murphy said. “Just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.”

Kenenske said that's when the activity started.

“Shortly after, it was sirens and just, kind of sounded a little chaotic around here for a minute.”
 
The men hopped in a truck and drove out to the source of the thick black smoke. They were able to get close to the blazing plant before the roads were closed off.

Some of the workers were leaving the scene of the fire.

“The one guy’s back of his hair was just, it had orange stuff out of it,” Murphy said. “It looked like it was melted and the back of his pants were melted, and he had chemical burns and stuff on him.”
 
The men weren’t too concerned about the black haze about a mile from their businesses.

“That’s far enough away,” Murphy said. “I don’t worry about it.”

But that wasn’t the case for the Greenfield Village neighborhood. The wind wasn’t blowing directly over the homes, but that gave little comfort to one man, who has lived there for eight years.

“I’ve just been watching which direction it’s blowing, to know whether I should just probably head out of the area just in case,” the man told NewsChannel5. “You just don’t know what’s in the smoke.”