An Attack Through The Attic -- Toilet Bomb: Frozen Chunk Of Waste From Airliner Slams Woodinville House

WOODINVILLE - Leroy and Gerri Cinnamon were at home watching the Seahawks get demolished on TV when the thing landed in their living room.

"I thought he fell through the attic," said Gerri, whose husband had just left the den, where the family was watching the game yesterday.

"It made one great, big, large ke-bang, and we thought something had exploded," Leroy said.

When they rushed into the living room, what they saw was chunks of green ice scattered everywhere - and a 3-foot by 2-foot hole through the ceiling and the roof of their one-story house.

But that was just the beginning of the adventure.

Firefighters who responded from King County Fire District 36 figured it had to be one of two things, the Cinnamons said: either frozen waste that fell from an airliner, or a meteorite that fell from space.

While the second possibility was still open, the Cinnamons' house was quarantined, and nobody was allowed to approach. A hazardous-materials response team was called in from Bellevue, its members clad in protective suits, to check for possible radiation.

"They treated us like we were radioactive," Gerri said.

When the pieces of the thing started melting, however, there was no doubt about what it was. "It stunk real bad," said Gerri.

Emergency personnel decided it was, indeed, a basketball-size hunk of frozen waste that had crashed through the Cinnamons' roof, landing only a few feet away from the spot in the next room where Gerri was sitting in front of the TV with her parents.

The Cinnamons' home on Mink Road Northeast is in a sparsely populated area, with a pasture directly across the street where the ice could have landed without anyone ever noticing.

"We don't get too many reports like this of someone getting their house hit," said Gary Mayer of the Federal Aviation Administration.

"I can remember one within the last year - and that could be over a seven-state region."

The FAA is investigating, but officials were ruling out the possibility that an airline crew had dropped the load on purpose.

"It's not a voluntary dumping situation," said Mike O'Connor of the federal agency.

A leak must have developed in one of the toilets of an airliner, O'Connor theorized. At higher altitudes, the waste would have formed into ice, clinging to the airplane. On the descent to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the airframe would have warmed up, causing the chunk to thaw and break loose.

O'Connor said the FAA is checking flight records to determine what airplane was over the Woodinville area on approach to Sea-Tac at the time the ice fell.

"We need to find the plane and get it fixed," he said.

As for the Cinnamons, they stored the pieces of ice in a plastic kitty-litter container in the freezer, just in case they need them for evidence.

"I did learn one thing," Gerri Cinnamon said. "I won't touch anything that falls from the sky."

-- Times East bureau reporter Stephen Clutter contributed to this story.