Leslie Wolf thought a bomb had dropped.

Dead asleep at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, her trailer shook. Her bedroom window shattered, spraying shards of glass inside. A picture of Jesus rattled and fell to the floor, and her smoke detector shot off the wall.

“All of a sudden it felt like my entire trailer was crashing down,” she said.

A beer tank exploded early Tuesday morning at the Abita Brewery creating open a hole in the ceiling and throwing debris into the air. (Staff Photo by Matthew Penix)

Wolf was one of several Abita Springs residents jarred awake Tuesday morning when a beer tank at Abita Brewery exploded, creating a huge hole in the ceiling and flinging huge shards of Styrofoam and aluminum siding skyward.

Nobody was injured during the accident.

The debris was largely picked up by Tuesday afternoon but pieces still hung in trees and lay on rooftops and on the grounds at Covington Manor trailer park separated only by a chain link fence and creek, less than 20 feet behind the brewery.

“It’s all over people’s homes,” said Stacy Bickham, who lives in the park. “A piece of roof landed in our yard.”

Bickham, like many others in the area, was shocked when the tank erupted.

Abita Beer employees were cleaning an empty aging tank by pumping CO2 inside to force out oxygen, “an enemy of beer,” said Beth Harris, a company spokeswoman.

Somehow pressure built inside the tank and caused it to explode, ceasing production for Tuesday only, she said.

“We’re still investigating why this happened,” she said, adding the process occurs daily and to a smaller extent inside beer bottles when they are processed. “The important part is that nobody was hurt or injured. But we apologize to the people of Abita.”

Mark Lawrence is just glad everyone is OK.

He was asleep when the thunderous rattle began. Then within moments a “big boom like a bomb going off” erupted, he said.

“I came off the bed about 6 feet in the air,” he said. “It started like World War III started.”

Within moments, everything was back to normal, he said, sans the family pictures spilled onto the floor and his shampoo tilted on its side, dripping into the carpet.

“It’s just a real stroke of fortune nobody was hurt,” he said.

Jason Perry agrees.

Perry, who also lives in the park, felt the boom on his chest and legs.

He thought a car had plunged into this trailer and darted outside to look around. He saw nothing but thick plumes of smelly smoke.

On Tuesday, Perry stood outside his trailer and surveyed the damage.

“Only now I’m starting to see what it is,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of twisted metal in the brewery’s ceiling.

“Whatever blew it had some pressure behind it,” he said. “I didn’t think you could feel a loud boom like that.”