EAST FLATBUSH, Brooklyn (PIX11) – It was a blast so strong that it's left two homes here on track to be demolished, and has forced two others to be vacated for the foreseeable future.
Now, fire inspectors continue to investigate the intense explosion from a gas leak at a home on East 37th Street in Brooklyn, which rocked the whole block.
"My entire house shook," said Nia Perou, who lives a half-dozen houses down. "I heard, 'Boom!' My house shook. Me and my dad, we ran downstairs. We thought someone's car ran into our house."
Paulette Thompson lives even closer to the home at 790 East 37th, whose impact was so great that its roof tiles went into the air and pierced metal awnings upon landing.
"You could see debris like smoke, not fire," Thompson said, "what looked like dust and smoke. Extremely scary."
Like so many of her neighbors in this closely knit block, Thompson ran to help.
Ruth Ford and her family also ran over to offer assistance. What they saw, she said, was both disturbing and heartbreaking.
"One guy's clothing was all stripped up," Ford said, "and he had a lot of cuts behind him, and the skin, it was peeling off." It left her 10-year-old grandson, who'd been with her at the time, crying, she said.
The explosion happened at around 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, and left three people from the home badly injured. Two were rushed to the burn unit at Staten Island University Hospital. Medics took another resident to Kings County Hospital. All three remain in critical condition.
One other person who was in the home had non-life-threatening injuries. The house in which they'd lived was condemned by the Department of Buildings. It's in a row of four homes whose walls are adjacent, one after another.
The northern wall of resident Yan Fen's home is also the southern wall of the house that exploded.
"The wall, it is broken," Fen said.
She'd fled from her home with her husband and 3-month-old baby as soon as the blast had occurred. Now, her home will need extensive repair, she said.
Meanwhile, the house where the explosion was will have to be demolished, according to the buildings department. The same is the case for the home next door, to the north of the house. Family members of a woman who lives there were on hand to help her try to deal with the emergency.
The woman's sister, who only gave her first name, Denise, said that the whole situation was sad.
"This is what has brought me to tears at this moment," she said. "We've had many family gatherings in here. I'm sorry," she said, choking back tears.
The home next to her sister's house was also ordered vacated.
On Friday evening, work crews started erecting a construction fence around the four homes to prepare two of them for demolition and the two others for extensive repairs.
In the meantime, the FDNY says that the explosion is apparently not related to natural gas infrastructure, even though technicians from the local utility, National Grid, were on hand all day working on the gas main.
Instead, said fire department investigators, the problem seemed to come from inside the exploded house. They said that they need to interview the residents to get more information. For now, though, most of those residents remain in the hospital, fighting to stay alive. An FDNY spokesperson said that the department hopes the victims recover fully.
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