Port Isabel.– As the most powerful rocket ever built rocketed off its launch pad in Boca Chica, Texas, on Thursday, the liftoff shook the ground and kicked up a billowing cloud of dust and debris, shaking houses and scattering brown dirt for miles.
In Port Isabel, a town about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) to the northwest where at least one window was broken, residents were alarmed.
“It was really scary,” said Sharon Almaguer, who, at the time of the launch, was at home with her 80-year-old mother. During previous releases, Almaguer said that she had experienced some tremors inside the brick house, but “this was on a whole other level.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX’s Starship exploded minutes after liftoff and before reaching orbit. Near the launch site, residents of Port Isabel, known for its imposing lighthouse, had to deal with disorder.
Virtually everywhere in the city “they ended up with a layer of a pretty coarse granular sand grain that just landed on everything,” Valerie Bates, a spokeswoman for Port Isabel, said in an interview. Images posted on social media showed residents’ cars covered in debris.
A window shattered in a gym, said its owner, Luis Alanis. Alanis, who was at his house at the time of the launch, said it felt “like a mini earthquake.” He calculated that fixing the window would cost around 300 kilometers.
Closer to the launch site, large pieces of debris were recorded flying through the air and colliding with an unoccupied car. Louis Balderas, the founder of LabPadre, which films SpaceX launches, said that while it was common to see some debris, smoke and dust, the impact of Thursday’s liftoff was unlike anything he had seen.
“There were pieces of concrete that were blown out of the launch pad area,” Balderas said. The explosion, he added, had created a crater that he estimated was around 8 meters deep.
In a statement posted on Facebook, the city of Port Isabel said Cameron County’s emergency management division had confirmed that the dust “was sand and dirt near the SpaceX launch site that was forcibly lifted into the air.” takeoff”. A spokeswoman for the county’s emergency management division said all questions about dust from the explosion should be directed to SpaceX.
