At 5:30 p.m., he went on break and decided to call his wife Sandy’s cell phone. Sandy and the couple’s daughter, Laura, were shopping and running errands in Decatur. Laura had decided to come home for the weekend from Parkland Community College in Champaign. Randy asked the two to pick up a Subway sandwich for him on their way home to Illiopolis.

He decided to cut short his second eight-hour shift for the day and spend some time with his daughter, whom he hadn’t seen in two weeks. Glen Lyman was called in and took over for Randy.

Lyman’s decision to come to work cost him his life.

About 10:40 that night, a massive explosion rocked the plant, followed by several smaller blasts. Five workers - Lyman, Randy and Linda Hancock, Larry Graves and Joe Machalek - lost their lives. Eight others were injured, including three firefighters, and one remains hospitalized in critical condition.

Fire departments and rescue workers from 28 agencies in five counties descended upon the town of 1,000 residents, trying to help out with one of Sangamon County’s worst disasters.

It’s one emergency workers had long wondered how they would handle.

A saying among rescue squad members a couple of decades ago was that if anything ever happened at what was then called the Borden plant, they intended to take the long way there “by going east, by going west until they came back around” the world.

LeBeane has spent his life within a mile of the plant - with its tall towers, chemical orbs, mazes of pipes and ever-pumping smoke visible from his yard - and 28 years working there. He’s never been afraid of it, he said.

“I never expected a catastrophic explosion like this. There’s so many safety features involved that if it all worked like it was supposed to, it makes a chance of something happening like this about zero. I’ve never been afraid to go to work there,” he said.

That night of April 23, LeBeane drove home from work, ate his sandwich and spent the evening with his family. Just as they were getting ready for bed, the lights went out.

“A second or two later, I heard a big ‘Boom!’,” he said. “I actually thought it was a transformer in my back yard. I went to check the dog because she’s right under the transformer. I turned back toward the house, and over my roof to the west I could see what it was.”

The initial explosion sent flames an estimated 10 stories into the air. A dark plume of smoke was visible even against the night sky.

The plant veteran threw on his clothes, told his wife and daughter to get ready because they might have to leave and - like many other off-duty Formosa employees - headed toward the plant.

Brad Stewart, a truck driver and chief of the town’s fire department where he’s volunteered for the past 22 years, lives a block from the firehouse. He was at home when the lights went out and he heard the blast.

“When you heard the boom, it was like you knew what it was. It was a sick feeling to tell your family to head east while you head west,” he recalled.

Within 30 seconds of the explosion, Stewart’s department was summoned to the scene by emergency dispatchers in Springfield. But Stewart was already on the way.

He went to the firehouse and called dispatch to tell them to send all the help they could. He didn’t see the plume of smoke the explosion left behind. All he could see were the flames.

“We did one drive-by to see what we could see. We went to the west side and sent a tanker to block the road. Then we drove by again and decided to set up a roadblock at the edge of town,” Stewart said.

“A few more phone calls and radio transmissions later, and we decided it was time to go in after it. We needed five minutes to collect our thoughts and get over the overwhelmedness of it all.”

Police Chief Bryon Honea was five miles away from Illiopolis on the Mount Pulaski blacktop when the countryside went dark and something rocked his car. Honea blocked the road he was on to prevent anyone other than emergency personnel from getting to the plant. His officer, Sgt. Timothy Harkins, was on duty at the time and took a similar position closer to the plant.

Harkins called out over his radio that the plant had exploded and that people were fleeing. Passers-by on the highway, residents, everyone dialed 911.

It was near shift change at the 911 center in the Sangamon County Complex. Dispatchers working from 3 to 11 p.m. were ending their shifts, and those who were going to start work at 11 had arrived at 10:30 p.m. The phones began buzzing at 10:43 p.m.

“When the calls came in, it’s a hard feeling to describe other than to say when there’s an incident, especially with a high probability of injury or loss of life, the adrenaline kicks in with the very first call,” said Jodie Moss, the 911 supervisor that night for the 3-11 shift.

In the first hour, there were 124 calls to 911. Normally, there would be 15 to 20. On non-emergency lines, there were another 577 calls between 10:30 p.m. and 1 a.m.

“Everyone on the floor for second shift was taking calls, and the people from the midnight shift were starting to filter down to relieve the second-shift workers. They could immediately see something big was going on, and they tried to get to a position to take more and more calls,” Moss said. “The timing was very much on our side” because of the extra people on hand.

Fire department after fire department was told to head to the scene. Two helicopters were dispatched and 10 to 12 ambulances. After a staging area was set up, dispatchers waited for emergency personnel to tell them what else was needed.

Lt. Gary Stone of the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office was at the office going through reports when sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to the Formosa plant. He didn’t immediately think much of it because there often is an overreaction to loud pops or bangs.

But he quickly realized, given the number of calls, that there was a major problem. He drove the 21 miles to Illiopolis to assist in blocking roads and evacuating people.

“I knew this had the potential to get pretty ugly,” Stone said.

It wasn’t long before many residents began heading out of town, which was plunged into darkness by a power outage in conjunction with the blast. By the time authorities ordered an evacuation, many people already had left. Residents in parts of three other nearby towns - Buffalo, Dawson and Mechanicsburg - were asked to leave, too.

Others, however, headed toward Illiopolis.

Roe Vadas, the plant manager, was at his home in Sherman when he felt a rumble while watching TV. He lives near enough to Capital Airport that he thought it might have been a sonic boom. About 10 minutes later, his phone rang. One of the reactor building employees was calling on a cell phone he’d been given by a shift supervisor.

“He was agitated,” Vadas said. “He didn’t give a lot of details except to say there’d been an explosion and that there were people hurt.”

After calling the homes of Formosa managers at the company’s New Jersey headquarters, Vadas changed his clothes, grabbed a coat and boots and prepared for what he described as the “long haul.” He headed toward the plant until stopped by a roadblock at the Mount Pulaski blacktop. He was sent to the command center near Illiopolis’ town diner.

Vadas arrived about 11:30 p.m. He didn’t leave for another 40 hours.

The Springfield Fire Department, one of fewer than 15 in the state that has a hazardous-materials division, was among those agencies dispatched almost immediately.

Tom Faulkner heads that haz-mat team and had just dozed off at his home about 11 p.m. when he got the call to go to Illiopolis. He stopped by his firehouse on South Ninth Street and scooped up equipment, including a spare portable radio. Other off-duty Springfield firefighters did the same.

He headed out of town on Interstate 72 but ended up in a traffic logjam caused by its closure and the rerouting of traffic. The glow of the burning plant and the cloud of smoke it was emitting was visible from at least eight miles away.

Faulkner arrived at the scene about midnight. Illiopolis’ chief, Stewart, decided the Springfield department should determine how the fire should be fought because of all the chemicals either in use or being stored at the plant. Several people were put in charge of that task and used a Formosa emergency plan in a black binder notebook that an Illiopolis officer carried in his car. Formosa employees also assisted.

“This was huge for us, to be honest,” Faulkner said of the blast.

“It wasn’t like it was the big city coming to the rescue of a small town. It was huge to us. To them, it was even more overwhelming because these (volunteer firefighters) are regular people. This was a truck driver. I worked with (Stewart) six hours that night and eight the next day, and that man is a credit to his community and to his job.”

Firefighters had a big task ahead of them. Water pressure to the plant had been lost, so volunteer fire departments had to haul tanker truck after tanker truck of water to the scene. That continued for at least two days.

Steve Hofferkamp Sr., supervisor of the water treatment plant at Formosa, had spent Friday evening eating pizza in Decatur with his daughter and two granddaughters - the “apples of my eyes,” he says - before heading home about 7:30 or 8. Hofferkamp, who lives a couple of miles north of the plant, was exhausted and went to bed while his wife fell asleep on the sofa.

He was jolted awake by a call from his daughter-in-law who was on I-72 on her way home to Illiopolis from Decatur when she saw the blast. She was hysterical.

“What’s going on at Formosa? The place is blowing up!” she screamed.

Hofferkamp went onto his deck and saw some of the smaller, subsequent explosions.

His granddaughters that he’d had pizza with earlier were headed back to his house for safety. They live in the subdivision closest to the plant.

“I guess my first instinct was to go to the plant, and they said, ‘No, you’re not leaving,’” Hofferkamp recalled.

His son and daughter-in-law blocked the driveway so he couldn’t leave. His granddaughters sat on each knee, clinging to him and crying. They didn’t want him to go. Other evacuated residents began arriving at his house, seeking refuge. One woman’s husband, Harold Daubs, was working at the plant that night. She hadn’t been able to reach him.

Someone at the plant eventually called Hofferkamp and asked for his help. He promised he’d be there in 20 minutes. He also promised to call with word on Daubs.

The scene on the Formosa grounds was tragic, heroic and hot.

When Chief Stewart’s volunteer firefighters arrived about five to 10 minutes after the blast, they determined their services would best be used for search and rescue. Firefighters from Buffalo, Mechanicsburg and Dawson also were there by this time.

“It was not mass confusion. The plant people were directing us, and there were injured, but that they weren’t sure where everyone was,” Stewart said. “We found one gentleman lying in about 2 feet of water. One (Formosa employee) was holding his head up, and another one was getting blocks off of him.”

Some of the four initially listed as missing were in the “hot zone” of the explosion, and firefighters couldn’t immediately enter that area.

Employees have surmised the workers

that night were likely preparing to end their shifts. At 10:30 p.m., things start to wind down on a normal Friday. Final readings of pressure and temperature gauges are being taken.

The only employee still hospitalized, Bradford Bradshaw, was likely working in the dryer building, which is adjacent to the north end of the reactor building.

Chris Havener was working in the lab, which is across a lot from the reactor building to the west, employees believe. He was rescued from under building rubble by the man Hofferkamp had been assigned to find - fellow employee Daubs, who had taken shelter during the explosion under a table. Havener was released Friday from Memorial Medical Center.

Karon Kaltenbach was the charge nurse in the Memorial emergency room and was preparing to end her shift when paramedics called with news of the explosion and the prospect of many trauma and burn victims.

Nurses who work in the ER and who also volunteer for their local fire departments were calling in to see if the hospital needed help. Kaltenbach notified surgeons to be on standby.

“Everyone pulled together,” she said. “I have been a nurse here for five years and, yes, this is the biggest disaster. We didn’t know what to anticipate … and we had to make sure all the people we needed were here.”

About 11:30 p.m., the seriously injured patients started arriving at Memorial, while a few with minor injuries went to other area hospitals.

Meanwhile, firefighters and rescue workers kept plugging away at the plant. Stewart said the local departments decided they had done all the rescue work they could do and refocused their attention until some of the bigger departments arrived.

“Once we were satisfied that we had treated everyone we could, we turned to the fire itself. We were not sure what we were fighting. That was the biggest thing, because of the chemicals in the plant,” he said.

“Our strategy was to keep things cool until we had enough professional, knowledgeable help there that could tell us what was burning. We’re talking about volunteers. I drive a truck. I have carpenters who work next to me.”

When Springfield’s firefighters arrived, they got together with Stewart and others to figure out a plan of attack. Faulkner said that because Springfield had a team of people trained in hazardous materials and special rescue techniques, it was sent in to search for the four missing workers.

They decided to first search perimeter areas because it was unlikely, Faulkner said, that anyone at the center of the blast would have survived.

As they got to the plant, the firefighters noticed the tanks that store vinyl chloride and learned that one of the first things Formosa employees did as the disaster unfolded was turn off the tanks’ valves. That was a big relief, as vinyl chloride is highly flammable.

“What I witnessed was a pretty amazing demonstration of how to move water. In the city of Springfield, we stop at a fire hydrant with all the water you possibly need,” Faulkner said. “In this case, they set up a portable dump tank, and tankers would come in and fill it. They had up to 20 fire departments just shuttling water. It was like watching the Eveready bunny.”

Water was hauled from nearly every small town in the area: Illiopolis, Dawson, Lanesville, Mechanicsburg, Mount Pulaski.

Hofferkamp, the water treatment plant

supervisor, left his house at 11:15 p.m. and arrived at the Formosa plant grounds shortly after by taking back roads that hadn’t been blocked.

“I’ve worked at the plant 37 years, and to pull into the plant and the plant is nothing but flames … all you could say was, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God,’” he said. “I’ve been in tough situations before in my life, and I never saw anything like it. It was a very terrifying situation, but it was incredible the way people worked together.”

He and other water employees found a portable generator on the plant grounds to pump water from the well field, accessing a 7 million gallon reservoir.

Eventually, Hofferkamp was sent to the area near where the explosion happened to shut off some more valves. He saw other Formosa employees who had survived the blast that night and fulfilled his promise by asking about Daubs. He was OK. Hofferkamp called home so Harold’s wife would know her husband was safe.

He saw some of the other 18 people who had been working at the plant that night. Some had fire hoses in hand.

“Not one of them ran. They had fire hoses out and were trying to fight the fire even before the fire departments got there. That takes a lot of intestinal fortitude,” Hofferkamp said.

“There are people who worked there for decades. The shifts rotate together. You get to know the people you work with better than your cousins. You become closer to them than your own family.”

LeBeane was of the same school of thought. He was turned away at a roadblock as he tried to get back to the plant.

“I think if I hadn’t called and talked to my wife at 5:30, I probably would have stayed until 11:30,” he said. “It was bad for Glen Lyman that he had been sitting by his phone when they called him at 5:30.”

Firefighters went on that night to find two bodies - those of Linda Hancock and Machalek - on the north end of the second floor of the building where readings are taken near the end of a shift. Lyman and Graves’ bodies were found the next day under rubble on the ground floor, near the northeast end of the building.

Springfield firefighters didn’t leave the scene until 3 p.m. Sunday. In all, the Illiopolis department estimates there were another 265 firefighters and other rescue personnel from 27 smaller fire departments who responded in some way to the explosion, using 63 vehicles.

Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency arrived about midnight and remained on the scene all night, monitoring air quality. Over the coming days, they were joined by public health officials and others, including firefighters, in a massive door-to-door effort to check air and water quality.

The explosion and ensuing fire left behind a charred and twisted jumble of pipes and metal.

“The majority of us are doing really well,” Chief Stewart said last week. “Some, it’s hitting now, and some, it will hit later. My blessing is that I came back with every firefighter I left with.

“Is the volunteering all worth it? I’ve done it for 22 years. I have respected every fire we go to. This one, I was scared. If you weren’t scared, it’s time to call it quits.”

Sarah Antonacci can be

reached at 788-1529 or sarah.antonacci@sj-r.com.