By Ethan Forman
DANVERS — The final house left to be replaced two years after the Dan-versport blast went back up yesterday.
The Bishop home, demolished by an excavator in October, took shape at 15 Riverside St., the 25th home to be torn down and replaced. A crane set the two sections of the modular home on a new foundation, and workers were busy installing the roof.
"It's satisfactory to try to get them back to a normal life," said Tony Lawrence of Middleton, a builder who has constructed three other homes in the neighborhood.
"It will be all weather-tight before the snow comes in (today)," said Lawrence, reassuring homeowner Cynthia Bishop on his cell phone.
Bishop is living temporarily in Maryland, where her husband, Charles, works as a foreman on a construction project building massive LNG tanks.
"It was a long, long process," Cynthia Bishop said by phone.
The early morning chemical plant explosion on Nov. 22, 2006, damaged hundreds of homes and businesses and more than 70 families were displaced.
Some families were able to repair their homes while others, like the Bishops, had to replace them.
While homes on Bates Street that were the most heavily damaged were torn down right away, others further away from the blast on Riverside Street came down one by one. They were replaced over time as families wrangled with insurance companies for reimbursements.
The Bishop house sat vacant for nearly two years before it was torn down. Cynthia Bishop said some questioned why it took them so long to rebuild.
She said their efforts to rebuild were hampered by obstacles they never could have predicted.
The blast destroyed the second floor and three sides of the foundation, she said, with just two walls on the first floor salvageable, she said. After several months, her private insurance adjuster could not work with the family anymore, she said.
The insurance company offered the family $35,000, too little to allow them to rebuild without a mortgage. She said they had to hire lawyers to fight for the $210,000 replacement cost.
There were other twists.
Her son, Buck Bishop, then 18, was involved in a three-car accident on the Topsfield-Danvers line on Route 1 that claimed the life of 73-year-old Joyce Oliver of Peabody on Nov. 16, 2007.
Cynthia Bishop said her son had been driving to a methadone clinic when he blacked out at the wheel, it was revealed in court. She said she missed the warning signs of depression in her son after the blast, and her son wound up "self-medicating."
In September, Buck Bishop pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide and was sentenced to 21รขÑ2 years in jail. He was to serve 15 months of that, with the balance of the sentence suspended for 10 years while on probation.
The judge gave him credit for 111 days he had already been in jail, and he was eligible for parole in four months. Cynthia Bishop said her son is in rehab and doing "very well."
Cynthia Bishop said finding a place to rent proved difficult with three dogs. She moved to a house in Topsfield and had to pay $2,800 in rent, after living for years without a mortgage. One of her dogs, a Siberian Husky named Lily, got an infection from glass in its eye from the blast and eventually had to be put down. While in Topsfield, she said the family came down with Lyme disease.
Her husband could not find construction jobs in Boston and had to move out of state to find work.
Under the strain of it all, about a year ago, Cynthia Bishop said she left her job at Joseph's Gourmet Pasta in Haverhill.
Meanwhile, the Topsfield home the family was renting flooded twice, she said, and they lost everything stored in the basement. Black mold bloomed on walls, she said. They had no stove for nine months.
The family stopped paying rent and the landlord went to court to evict them, Cynthia Bishop said. They eventually moved out.
The builder plans to complete the first floor of the new home over the next seven weeks so the family can move back. Once in, they plan to complete the rest of the second floor over the winter.
Cynthia Bishop does not consider this a sob story, however.
"It has made us stronger," she said of the ordeal. "We just can't wait to be back in our neighborhood."
