A man thought gunshots shattered his window. Another man saw smoke in the air but wasn’t sure of the source of the explosion he felt from blocks away. And a woman driving by the home on Southwest 20th Street in West Park after midnight on Tuesday was out of breath describing what she witnessed.
The calls made to 911 after a home exploded in West Park this week detail how the blast could be heard, felt and seen from several blocks away and the destruction of the home that blew up with four people inside. The family, two adults and two children, survived with severe burns. Three of them are still being treated at the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami while one, a young boy, was released from Memorial Regional earlier this week.
At least four homes are now unsafe to live in and city officials earlier this week were in the process of documenting how sweeping the damage is in order to find assistance for residents who were affected.
The source of the apparent gas explosion was a home just near the corner intersection of Southwest 52nd Avenue and Southwest 20th Street. One of the people who called 911 about 12:30 a.m. could see the smoke rising from where he was blocks away, in the area of Southwest 48th Avenue and Southwest 19th Street, according to 911 calls the Broward Sheriff’s Office released Friday.
“There was a large explosion,” the man said. “I still see the smoke in the air … I’m running there now.”
The 911 dispatcher asked if he knew what exploded, but the only information the man had was what he could see, only the smoke.
“I don’t see anything, but the explosion was loud enough to shake my apartment from 48th Ave.,” he told the dispatcher.
While on the phone with the dispatcher, as he got closer to Southwest 20th Street, he talked with a man in the background of the call about where the noise came from. Neither knew where the smoke was coming from, but the man in the background said it came from behind his house.
“I saw the smoke! I didn’t see where it came from,” the caller told the man in the background. The caller told the dispatcher there was no unusual smell in the area and that he did not see anyone or anything suspicious.
A third man who called 911 sounded hesitant and asked how long it would take for police to arrive. He said he heard a “bang” about a minute earlier that shook his home, that “felt like something ran through the house.” He said didn’t want to go outside.
“Was it like an explosion? Or like a gunshot?” the dispatcher asked.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It was very loud, and it was shook.”
He told the dispatcher he couldn’t see anything outside of his window. The dispatcher told him others had already called, reporting something similar.
A woman who was driving by at the moment of the explosion seemed to be the only caller who knew what happened. She was out of breath, shouting at someone in the background multiple times for the address.
“I was driving and my car got caught in the collision,” she said. She sounded in shock but said she was OK. She saw someone bleeding.
“Is anything burning?” the 911 operator asked. The woman seemed to be away from her phone by that point, the dispatcher repeatedly asking “Hello?” Inaudible commotion in the background could be heard before she came back, gasping.
“Oh, my god,” she said when she returned, gasping for breath. “The whole house just explode.”
“Take a deep breath for me, OK?” the operator said and asked for the address.
She tried to catch her breath.
“You guys need to come fast … It was a big old explosion!” she said.
A relative of the four people who were hospitalized wrote in an online fundraiser on the platform GoFundMe that it was a miracle they survived.
“Our loved ones, including my spouse and our children, have suffered severe burn injuries, which require extensive medical treatment, rehabilitation, and ongoing care,” the fundraiser’s organizer Matthew Ledix wrote. “The explosion left us homeless and deprived us of basic necessities such as shelter, clothing, furniture, and personal belongings.”
Ledix wrote that the family is left “with nothing but charred remnants and painful burns.”
The State Fire Marshal is investigating the cause.