Toxic Fog Drifts Over Area

She just doesn't understand that we have to leave," a middle-aged woman said frantically, pointing to her aged mother.

The DePalmas called a cab yesterday morning to go to the Somerville Bradlees department store. They got no farther than the edge of Washington St., where police, guarding a leaking tank car, turned them back.

Go Away

And when the taxi turned around to take them back to their home, they found a cruising patrol car announcing over the loudspeaker, "Evacuate immediately. Please leave the area of this emergency."

"How will we get out?" Mrs. DePalma asked. "We have to leave; there's been a disaster. We have to leave," she told her mother, who began to cry.

On the Monsignor O'Brien highway, one of the nearby streets police closed off, only an occasional emergency vehicle sirened by, heading toward the source of the white cloud.

An older man, poorly dressed, wandered down the deserted sidewalk and upon the bridge, where the gas--dense enough to make breathing hard even with a soaked handkerchief held over one's nose--hung like a shroud.

"Turn around, don't go through that gas," an onlooker yelled. And finally, wheezing, wiping his eyes, the old man retreated from the bridge and sat by the side of the road coughing.

At an intersection just outside the police barricades, a woman sat weeping behind the wheel of a late-model brown sedan. She wore a white surgical mask.

A mile away, in East Cambridge, most residents reacted calmly. But on Cambridge St., one elderly woman scampered to her door, the collar of her winter coat held tight against her face.

Dr. Peter Boyle at Somerville Central Hospital looked at the x-rays and took blood samples from patients all day. "We're not too sure what this stuff is," another hospital worker said. "If anything unusual happens to you, make sure and call us."

"I just wanted to see what the cloud was. If I'd known it was going to make me choke, I never would have gone near it," another patient, still breathing shallowly an hour and a half later, said