Cause sought as explosion destroys Riverside home
By Maki Becker NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 05/04/08 7:03 AM
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- Firefighters go through the debris after Saturday’s explosion blew off the roof and exterior walls of the home at 80 Wiley St.
While holding her her 8-month-old son Saturday morning in her kitchen, Juana Melendez felt the house shake.
At first, she thought her car had blown up.
Then she looked outside and saw two windows flying past.
“We just grabbed the kids and left,” she said.
The vacant house next door at 80 Wiley St. in Buffalo’s Riverside section inexplicably exploded just after 10 a. m. Saturday.
The explosion blew off the house’s roof and outer walls, hurtling two-by-fours, plaster board, mangled window frames and giant shards of glass across the neighborhood.
Tiffany Braid, 22, who was baby-sitting a neighbor’s child, said she was sitting on the steps, drinking a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette, when the house directly across the street, blew up.
“It just went ‘boom,’ ” she said. “I felt glass on my sweater. I saw fire and smoke.”
Her hands still shaking a half hour after the explosion, she recalled the coffee spilling all over her jeans as the window frames came crashing down on the lawn just 50 feet in front of her.
She then ran to the backyard where the 9-year-old boy she was looking after had been playing. He was unharmed but shaken up. She took him inside and turned on some cartoons on television to calm him down.
“I’ve seen a lot of houses blow up on TV,” she said. “But I’ve never seen one blow up. I’ve never felt a house explode before.”
Dozens of firefighters and police officers raced to the scene, fearing that someone could have been inside the house.
But neighbors said the house had been vacant for some time, and nothing indicated that anyone had been in it at the time of the explosion.
No one in the neighboring houses had been hurt.
Fire Division Chief Jack Hess said the cause of the explosion remained under investigation.
He said all the utilities still were connected.
A gas leak might have caused the explosion, Hess said, but added that fire investigators had found only a faint odor of something like sulfur.
“We’re going to cover all the bases,” he said.
Hess said it was unlikely the work of an arsonist. “Arsonists don’t use bombs,” he said.
Mayor Byron W. Brown came by the scene later in the morning to assess the situation.
“I’m just here to check on any residents,” he said.
A tear trickled down the cheek of Kelly Fogarty, 23, as she stared in disbelief from behind the yellow crime scene tape that had been put up across Wiley.
Her boyfriend, Chuck Sears, 23, was in the process of buying the destroyed house, and they were planning to move in together.
He said he was supposed to close on the house in 15 days.
“Yesterday I drove by the house, and it was perfectly fine,” said Sears, a manager at KD Fluid Power in Lackawanna. “[Saturday] at 10 a. m., I got a call that my house was blown up.”
The house needed some work on the floors and new paint, Fogarty said. But otherwise, it seemed fine.
“It was a fixer-upper, but I was prepared for that,” Sears said. “All that planning, all that preparation, . . . now I’m back to Square One.”
News Staff Reporter Jay Rey contributed to this report. mbecker@buffnews.com
