“It looked like an empty movie set,’’ Jennifer Wroblewski, 27, said while standing on the steps of First Church of Monson Congregational. She lives on the outskirts of town, near the border with Palmer on State Avenue, and was home Wednesday about 4:30 p.m. when the face of her beloved Monson, the place she considers the center of her world, changed forever.
“Everything was just still. The sky was still. Even the traffic on the road stopped,’’ Wroblewski said. “It was deathly quiet for like three minutes. That was, of course, after the terrible hailstorm.’’
She looked out her window to see “the clouds swirling over the top of the hill, and you knew something was happening.’’
Her apartment survived unscathed, but when she emerged to survey the damage in the center of town, “I broke down when I saw it. I pay my taxes in Town Hall. I use the library. This place is the center of my universe.’’
The storm roared through town, devouring homes as it moved along Paradise Lake and Ely roads to Main Street, where it knocked steeples off churches, felled trees along what some call Millionaire’s Mile — a section of Main Street filled with Victorian homes once owned by wealthy mill owners in the 1800s — and blew the police station’s communication tower into the parking lot and ripped the roof off Town Hall.
Jerry Girard had been home from work for only a few minutes Wednesday when he heard unusual sounds on the roof. Girard, who lives in a light gray Victorian on Main Street, had just let Sarge in from what used to be the German shepherd’s galvanized steel pen, which is now nothing more than a heap of crumpled metal, when the strange rhythm began to play on the shingles.
