"Not only are our daughters gone, but our house is gone. We have nothing. We lost everything we worked so hard for," said Tara Carey at her mother's Milford home yesterday, her face drained of emotion.

"Who ever expects your house is going to blow up? You think you're safe in your own house. Who can comprehend it?"

Distraught over the loss of their daughters, Iris, 4, and Violet, 51/2, Heath and Tara wondered why they survived the explosion that destroyed 65 Main St., a building that four families called home.

The couple, who set up a play area and beds for their children at their downtown Milford clothing store, freakandfrolic.com, said they lived to provide their children with a better life.

"What do you work for? What do you go on for?" Heath said. "It's just us."

The Careys had put their daughters to bed at 9 p.m. after flipping through catalogues for back-to-school clothes. Two hours later, Heath and Tara snuggled up to their children in the same bed, the only way the family has ever slept.

"It didn't matter where you were sleeping, they would be right on top of you," Tara said.

They never smelled or heard anything that made them nervous, but a massive boom woke up the couple and their daughters almost three hours after Tara and Heath fell asleep.

"All of a sudden, there was this huge explosion of orange and blue flames," said Tara, who saw the flames through her closed eyes.

"Within seconds, or at the same time, everything kept falling on us. It was suffocating. Now I realize we were dropping from the second to the first floor and everything was falling on top of us."

Tara said she thought it was the end of the world.

"I thought we were getting shoved under ground," she said.

Once they stopped moving, the Careys realized they had been shifted around, and later learned their living room toppled over their bedroom, which used to look out onto Main Street.

Tara said she kept her left arm over her head to protect herself and push up some of the falling house, leaving open a space where she could breathe.

"I could feel the oxygen changing," she said. "I was having trouble breathing."

Their first instinct was to search for Iris and Violet. They could hear their daughters gasping for air and crying for their mother, but could not see the little girls.

Heath said he heard gasping behind the pile of debris in front of him and could reach out and touch one of their daughters. He tried to free her, but he could barely move himself or the debris.

"I just heard gasping for breath," he said, mimicking his daughter's labored breathing. "It slowed and then I heard nothing."

Tara, trapped by debris blocking her face, said she could also reach out and feel the face of one of the little girls, and made sure there was nothing blocking her nose or mouth.

The girl repeatedly cried, "Mummy, I can't breathe," before she too became silent, Tara said.

"They didn't talk again," she said. "I thought maybe they fell back asleep."

Firefighters began to scream, "Is anyone in there?" but the Careys' screams of response were met with silence.

Knowing they needed help to remove their trapped daughters, Heath and Tara began to try to free themselves from the rubble.

Heath was sitting upright with his back to their metal headboard, so hot from the fire it burned his back. The heat also burned the right side of his face and singed his eyebrow.

"I was so wedged in there I couldn't move," he said. "I could turn my back and see the flames. I thought it would keep moving and we would be burned to death."

Heath began to move items from behind his crossed legs, on top of which Tara's legs lay, and managed to free his lower body. He also helped Tara out of the debris.

Ahead, Heath saw a tunnel of light that led to the outside and the screaming firefighters.

"I could see light, but it was so small," he said. "I didn't know if we could get out."

The couple wrestled themselves from the mess of furniture and wood and shimmied through the tunnel. They crawled out of the home from its easterly side, through an opening no more than a foot high, and screamed for firefighters to retrieve their daughters.

"I told every person I saw, we know where they are," Tara said. "I was screaming, 'I'll go back in.' "

Firefighters found and removed a dust-covered Iris soon after. Paramedics worked to revive the little girl, who was in cardiac arrest. She was pronounced dead at Milford-Whitinsville Regional Hospital at 3:20 a.m.

Violet was pulled from under a bureau around 6:30 a.m., already dead. Firefighters and rescue personnel stood in a moment of silence as her body was pulled from the wreckage.

Firefighters found Violet hours earlier, but waited to pull her out. Fire Chief Gary Daughtery said rescuers determined the little girl would not make it. Officials wanted to shut off the gas, which was still leaking into the house, before they started to cut her body free.

Fire Lt. Francis Clark said both girls were lying side by side on the same mattress, no more than two feet apart.

Tara said she and her husband tried so hard to shield their children from harm and kissed even the smallest bump.

"We were so protective of them," she said.