The final seconds of N.C. State’s 24-20 Thursday-night upset over Florida State rolled off the clock, and Ann Symm was ready for bed. And while her two boys, Jason, 15, and Jared, 13, slept upstairs in their Apex home, Mindy, the family’s 6-year-old poodle, started to bark.

Then the mother heard an explosion.

“It was right after the game, so I guess it was after 12 [midnight],” Ann Symm said. “I thought to myself, ‘Wow, someone’s celebrating pretty loud.'”

She heard more explosions and decided to call the police.

Busy.

So she got in her car and drove around the block, where, 15 minutes after she first heard the noise, silenced police cars flashed their blue lights and blockaded the road.

“I asked the cops, ‘What’s going on here?'” she said. “They said it was ‘some chemical explosion,’ and I nonchalantly said ‘OK, thank you.'”

She then called her 20-year-old daughter Jessica, a senior in business management.

“I was driving back, and I thought my mom was calling to celebrate the game, so I didn’t answer. Hey, she called me a hundred times during the game, so I just didn’t answer it,” Jessica said. “And then she called me again and I answered and was like, ‘What? An Explosion? In Apex?'”

That night, the Symms heard the E.Q. Industrial Services storage facility explode, which sent organic oxides and pesticides into the air less than a mile from their home in the Shepherds Vineyard subdivision.

“Artillery. It sounded like artillery,” Jason said. “Like in the war movies.”

It wasn’t a war zone, but it was close. It was a small town’s nightmare. Toxic chemicals were in the air, and Jessica wanted her family out of the area.

“They evacuated when I made them evacuate,” Jessica said. “My mom said they were thinking of not leaving, but I said ‘No, you’re evacuating.’ We were on the edge of the evacuation zone, and I thought that if the winds changed then they’d have to evacuate, and I wasn’t going to let them go to an elementary school and sleep on cots. So I told them to sleep here.”

“I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep wondering if my family was going to breathe those fumes and die in their sleep.”

So, around 1:30 a.m., Jeffrey and Ann Symm grabbed the boys and the animals and headed over to Jessica’s apartment at University Suites in Raleigh.

“In the middle of the night, I just thought we needed to get out of there, but you feel stupid because it’s hard to believe it’s really happening,” Ann said. “It was kind of like a moment of disbelief.”

But in the confines of Jessica’s 1,530-square-foot Raleigh apartment, the Symm family was, at the very least, safe.

Gizmo the cat, however, didn’t have any cat litter, and in the wee hours of Friday morning, the family bonding began.

“At like 2:30 in the morning, we went over to the volleyball court and get some sand as a make-shift Kitty Litter box, but she didn’t like it,” Jessica said. “So this morning we went and got some Kitty Litter, but I still don’t think she’s used it.”

The father chimed in with a potential headline.

“I got a headline for you,” he said. “‘Cat litters box, can’t sand it.'”

The family, packed shoulder-to-shoulder on couches like refugees at a shelter, erupted into laughter.

According to Jeffrey, this weekend has made him question his town’s leadership.

“It makes me question the town commissioners that they allowed something like this to be there,” Jeffrey said. “You know, Sharon Harris [nuclear power plant] tells us they’re there. They send us stuff saying, ‘Hey, we know we could be bad roommates, but we want to be good roommates. We’re going to tell you everything we’re doing.'”

“So, [to the town commissioners] how about telling us you’ve got other people like that in the area? That way, I can make a conscious decision and know that at least I knew it was there, and I stayed.”

He added he wants to know if the town is going to let the company return.

“Apex made a conscious decision to make Apex a family community,” Jefferey said. “But then they allow these companies in that are contradictory to that family environment. So, I would question the commissioners and say, ‘Hey, are you going to let them come back in?'”

The Symm family, however, returned home to Apex Saturday morning.

Jessica stands by her decision to “force” her family over Friday morning, but she said it wasn’t entirely a good time.

“Yeah, I forced them over, but it’s not like it was fun the whole time,” she said. “It was tough because I felt like I was imposing on my roommates. And my family was all in one room. We had one bed, and we shared one bathroom. It was tough, but I’m glad I did it.”