Westport ‘Loud Bang’ That Left Half the Town Puzzled Is Solved

There's been a strange trend of unexplained loud noises on the SouthCoast over the past few years. Just recently, there was an unexplained loud bang in Swansea and this morning, another loud bang happened in Westport.

Just around 7:30 a.m., a loud bang shook several houses around the northern Route 6 area of Westport, centralized around Davis Road and Highland Avenue. Folks immediately flocked to Facebook to see if anyone else had heard and felt the shock, and for the most part, it seems as though a majority of people who did lived around that area.

I notified the Westport Police Department and nothing had been reported at the time, leaving me to believe that this was not an earthquake, as some people were speculating. The USGS Advanced National Seismic System earthquake tracker reported no seismic activity in the area.

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This morning, Michael and Maddie spoke with Westport firefighter Bob Porawski, who described the bang as a loud vibration, as if something hit the house.

"We were eating breakfast and the house shook from the noise. Even the dogs perked up," Porawski said. "We live near Mid City Scrap and sometimes there are propane tanks that get squashed and sometimes you hear that. So automatically we said, 'I wonder what happened at Mid City?'"

Now, since Mid City Scrap is located within the vicinity of the reported loud noise, my initial guess would have been that it derived from there, and lo and behold, therein lied the answer. Mid City confirmed that a large steel plate was dropped onto one of their railcars while offloading the metal around the same time. It was loud enough to be heard around the property line, where a majority of the reports came into Facebook.

Thankfully, it was not an earthquake and another "big bang" has been solved. Carry on, Westport.