http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/20/nyregion/after-bombing-on-jersey-shore-residents-try-to-make-sense-of-chaos.html 2016-09-20 10:15:42 After Bombing on Jersey Shore, Residents Try to Make Sense of Chaos No one was injured when a bomb went off Saturday morning in the quiet community of Seaside Park, N.J., but an idyll has been interrupted. === SEASIDE PARK, N.J. — It was a deserted Monday at the end of the summer season; a determined rain and the news were keeping people inside, watching their flat-screen televisions. Live on Fox and CNN, local and federal authorities were announcing the A copy of The Daily News lay on Marilyn Casey’s wooden coffee table. “TERROR,” the front page said. It was hard to imagine that it all On the morning of the explosion, Ms. Casey was concentrating on a crossword puzzle. Her neighbor down D Street was having her morning coffee. Another neighbor was getting ready to go out for a haircut. The couple across the street had taken a leisurely bike ride to the south end of the boardwalk. It was around 9:30 a.m. on Saturday: almost time for the beach. The boom punched them all in the ears and brought everyone to their front doors, some still in their slippers. Trucks colliding? A cannon announcing the start of the Semper Five, an annual five-kilometer charity run to benefit Marines and their families? Someone’s son ran down to the end of the street to take a look. It was then that neighbors learned that the plastic garbage can next to the beach path, of all things in all places, was lying in jagged bits all over the sand and North Ocean Avenue. “You take your beach chair, and walk up to go sit on the beach, and then get blown up — I mean, who would think that?” said Gene Manfra, a retired shop teacher from Wayne, N.J., who now lives on D Street year-round. “You kind of get used to things in New York. Then here, you kind of say, ‘Wow.’ Here, it’s a different world.” No one was hurt in Seaside Park, likely at least in part because the charity race, which would have passed right by the garbage can, was delayed. By Monday, there was almost no sign that anything untoward had happened on D Street, except for a small grove of miniature American flags that someone had planted where the garbage can once stood. (Mr. Manfra said he had seen a young man with a crew cut wearing a T-shirt that read “Semper Fi,” the Marine Corps motto, bring the flags on Sunday.) The residents, however, were somewhat less serene. Ms. Casey, for one, had a sunglasses-shaped pink sunburn that she acquired standing outside all afternoon on Saturday, after law enforcement officials evacuated the residents on the street across the main road. Everyone had made the best of it, sitting in their beach chairs and sharing snacks as they watched the street fill up with fantastical-looking armored vehicles from the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Naval Criminal Investigative Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and a few local agencies. But it was hard not to let the mind wander in unsettling directions. “When they say it can happen anywhere, you say, ‘Yeah, right, not here,’” said Ms. Casey, who has been coming to the Jersey Shore since the 1940s, and who worked at The Asbury Park Press for 41 years. The authorities on television were saying Mr. Rahami could face additional charges for shooting police officers who had chased him down in the streets of Linden, N.J. The newscasters were talking about how he had lived in nearby Elizabeth, above his family’s chicken restaurant. “Elizabeth?” said another D Street year-rounder, Carol Ryan, bemused, as though Elizabeth was any less mysterious a target for terrorism than Seaside Park. “Why Elizabeth, for heaven’s sakes?” The whole thing was bemusing, really. The Ryans never lock their doors. “If a dog is lost, the whole town will go out and try to find it,” she said. Maybe it was the wide mental and geographical distance that separates Chelsea in Manhattan from D Street, but few of the year-round residents thought the New York explosion that injured 29 on Saturday evening was connected to the blast at the end of the block until the next day. Maybe it was the reassured complacency that had set in over the years: Even when The day of the explosion, things were, if not exactly normal, at least not the stuff of presidential news conferences and hourly briefings. While her husband helped direct traffic as a member of the Seaside Park Volunteer Fire Department, Margaret Mueller, a shore resident since she was 4 years old, went for the haircut she had briefly put off when the explosion happened. For Kelly Dixon, who spent Sunday night at her parents’ house so as not to be alone in her home on D Street, Monday brought the tears. “I think my emotion comes from — no one is exempt from something like this happening,” she said.