Silver Spring apartment explosion sends 10 to hospital, leaves others missing

Goldstein said several people remained unaccounted for and that K-9s had alerted people might trapped below the collapsed jumble of brick, steel, glass and concrete at the Friendly Garden Apartments.

About 100 people were displaced by the explosion, including 35 in the building that was destroyed in the 2400 block of Lyttonsville Road, Goldstein said. Two other apartment buildings were damaged in the six-building complex and are not safe to inhabit for the time being.

Sylvia Bunyasi, 48, was at home in a nearby building.

The cause of the blast was under investigation Thursday, but Goldstein said there had been no reports of gas leaks at the complex since Jan. 1. Some residents reported smelling gas before the blast.

Some firefighters and rescue dogs were able to carefully walk atop the rubble pile on Thursday. The dogs are trained to detect bodies that are both alive and dead. The dogs indicated possible “alerts” that at least one body was under the rubble, Goldstein said.

Goldstein said the risk was very high for firefighters, with two unstable, unsupported walls — at least 30 feet high — looming over the rubble. Equipment was being brought in to knock down the walls.

The explosion and fire occurred around 10:30 a.m. Goldstein said crews arrived to find all four stories of the building engulfed in flames. Fire department spokesman Pete Piringer said the scene was harrowing: “We have catastrophic damage.”

He went to the rear of his townhouse, and looked out a window to a destroyed apartment building about 200 feet away. Five seconds later, he said, he started to see flames. Thirty seconds after that, he said, he saw the front wall of the building fall forward.

“People were running out of the place,” Gautam said.

He saw a woman hanging out of a second-story window, holding a very young child. A man below found something to climb on, reached out, and was able to grab the child’s feet to rescue the child, Gautam said.

Tito Garcia, 40, was showering Thursday morning when he felt his apartment shake in a building near the blast.

Garcia grabbed his 13-year-old son and ran out of his unit with Bunyasi. They tried exiting from the back of their building, but the pathway was blocked off with debris engulfed in flames.

Entire sections of the building opposite theirs — 2405 — had fallen off, Garcia said.

Steve Inman, who lives nearby, rushed to the scene of the blast after hearing a “big boom.” He said the front of the building had fallen away and the top had been sheared off. He said he helped evacuate people from a portion of the building that had not collapsed.

Crews from Pepco and Washington Gas were on the scene examining the structures and power and gas lines. Goldstein said the recovery would be a multiday operation. Crews planned to work until dark Thursday night and resume operations Friday morning.

By noon Thursday, dozens of residents from Friendly Garden and surrounding apartment complexes had gathered along Lyttonsville Road.

Pablo Deleon, 21, said he was sleeping in his apartment in a nearby complex, Paddington Square, when he heard a massive boom.

When he exited his room, all he could see was smoke, he said.

“It was just mass hysteria, giant, giant flames,” he said.

Jibreel Seid, 68, heard about the explosion from his wife. Seid, who is originally from Ethiopia, said his family was one of many immigrant families who lived in Friendly Garden. He had been at work when his wife called saying that the building next to theirs had caught fire.He rushed home to try to get his family’s immigration documents from his first-floor unit but firefighters would not let him through. There was a chance that the fire could spread, they told him.

The explosion was reminiscent of another nearby. In August 2016, a natural gas blast killed seven people and injured dozens more at the Flower Branch Apartments in Silver Spring. That blast also left a gutted shell where a building once had been.

Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich (D) was at the building Thursday and promised a thorough investigation, and government assistance to all who needed it. He said the building that was destroyed contained affordable housing units. He called the scene “flat-out depressing.”

“It was kind of horrifying when you look at a building and see it gutted and walls down,” Elrich said. “You see all the debris piled up and all you can think is, ‘What happened to the people?’ ”