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A Truly Terrifying Scene

Debris fallen from a United Airlines airplane’s engine lay scattered through the neighborhood of Broomfield, outside Denver, Colorado, on February 20, 2021.
Debris fallen from a United Airlines airplane’s engine lay scattered through the neighborhood of Broomfield, outside Denver, Colorado, on February 20, 2021. Photo: Chet Strange/AFP (Getty Images)

Besides the very clear physical fallout littered among neighborhood lawns and streets, the incident seems to have shaken the community most of all.

“A lot of people said they heard that really loud explosion which startled a lot of people, and then they just started seeing basically what they thought was a plane falling from the sky,” Welte, the Broomfield Police Department rep, said.