SUN PRAIRIE, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – It’s been a week since a gas leak caused the Sun Prairie explosion.
The blast claimed the life of a Captain Cory Barr and leveled a section of Main Street, including some downtown buildings.
There are a lot of questions that remaining. That includes how a community moves forward, following an incident of this magnitude.
Picking up the pieces in the wake of such a devastating explosion like this hasn’t been easy.
People have just recently been allowed back into their homes and businesses, but only for a few minutes and just to gather some of their belongings.
They say they are doing the best they can to return to some semblance of normalcy.
Salvatore’s Tomato Pies was just one of several businesses affected by the blast and is considered to be in the hot zone.
“We’ve been closed since last Tuesday, so there’s no income coming in,” Salvatore’s owner and chef Patrick DePula said. “We have 35 employees that are idle right now and, you know, obviously it definitely has an effect on our business and the financial stability of Salvatore’s.”
Up until last Friday, the restaurant owner wasn’t able to access his restaurant.
With no power, he said hundreds of pounds of food he was forced to leave behind when evacuated went to waste. Still, he and his staff felt the need to give back and, through donations, rounded up enough food to cook for first responders after Captain Barr’s funeral.
“In the end, what’s really important is life; it’s irreplaceable. There’s a family in Sun Prairie that’s grieving, they are a larger fire department family and emergency services family that’s grieving the loss of Captain Barr,” DePula said. “You know, things can be replaced, buildings can be replaced, food can be replaced, items can be replaced, but people cannot.”
City officials and locals said the unintended result of this tragedy was a community really coming together to help one another.
Bank of Sun Prairie has even established a disaster relief loan with zero-percent interest for six months, just to help owners get back on their feet.
The city has also been trying to help residents and business owners out as much as possible.
“We’ve actually had a business [meeting] with all the affected business owners down at city hall last Friday, just to kind of give them information on what we’ve got available, updates on the project, making sure they’ve got the right utility contacts for information, those types of…kind of real basic types of things,” Sun Prairie director of economic development Neil Stechschulte said.
The director said an effort to move funds around in the budget and discussions about what will replace the damaged buildings are also in the works.
And while people in the city say things may never get back to how they were before the explosion, it has proven that the area and its people are “Sun Prairie Strong.”
