Neighbor furious with flavors company after N.Ky. explosion

FLORENCE, Ky. - Jay Aseere is in a fighting mood.

The Florence resident has been angry for years with his neighbor, a flavors and fragrances manufacturer called Givaudan.

One of their plants sits next to the trailer park he and his wife Connie call home.

"You can't even go outside of your place here because of the smell here," he said. "Everybody here has complained to them... They don't do anything about it... You want to puke when you smell it."

But Wednesday, his anger had nothing to do with unpleasant odors.

"This is from an explosion at the place," he said on a video he took moments after an explosion rocked their home.

"We were just watching TV and all of a sudden, a big explosion and all the pictures started falling off the wall," Connie Aseere said. "The trailer kind of moved and we looked out and you could see fire shooting out of one of their tanks.

Jay caught an image of the fireball with his cellphone.

"It scared the hell out of us." Jay said. "It knocked the place to hell here."

He says he called 911.

Jay also says he called the plant to see if anyone was injured.

When no one answered, he took it upon himself to investigate.

He entered the property with his cellphone video recorder running.

When he was spotted taking pictures on the property, he was told to leave.

"That's what I'm upset about," he said. "The way I was treated there, because I am the one that initiated the call, because it was that bad."

The company's emergency response team  would not answer any questions about the explosion, but firefighters say it happened when a truck was unloading product near a rear silo.

Jay's pictures show plenty of tangled wreckage from the blast; more evidence, he says, that the company has to go.

"They should move it out to the country somewhere," he said. "Not in a city here like this."

No one was hurt as a result of the explosion.