http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/index.php?smp=&lang=engA powerful explosion killed a construction worker and critically injured four others in a hardscrabble town in New Jersey yesterday as it leveled a nearly built home and an abandoned apartment building and sent a hurricane of fiery debris, splintered wood and shattered glass flying for blocks around.The blast — apparently the fault of bumbling vagrants who broke in to the new house to steal pipes for scrap and severed a natural gas line — was yet another blow to the run-down East Ward of Irvington,N.J., an old industrial town west of Newark that has been plagued for years by criminal gangs, drug addicts, prostitutes and poverty.To its neighbors on a struggling block of trash-strewn lots and modest homes — some occupied by working-class families, others gutted by fires and vandals and boarded up — the three-story house under construction at 20th Avenue and 22nd Street was an island of hope. It was to be sold next week, Mayor Wayne Smith said.Yesterday, shortly before 7:30 a.m., four construction workers and a security guard who had left a watchdog at the site overnight arrived at the house almost simultaneously. The construction crew was to begin putting the finishing touches on its work, and the security guard was to pick up his dog.But as soon as they stepped inside, they knew something was wrong. There were signs of a break-in, and an odor of gas, the mayor said. One called a boss on a cellphone to report the problems.Suddenly, the house blew up, burying the five men in a tangle of beams and burning rubble. Somehow the dog escaped.The blast also brought down the vacant three-story, three-family building next door, which according to neighborhood residents had become a haven for addicts and vagrants.It was to have been demolished on Monday, according to Larry Hanover, a spokesman for its owner, the state’s Schools Development Authority. No one was in the building at the time of the collapse, officials said.The force of the thunderous explosion radiated outward for several blocks, damaging what a Red Cross official said were 36 other homes — warping door jambs, buckling sills, shattering windows and igniting small fires. Insulation and aluminum siding were hurled into the branches of trees in a vacant lot. Streets and sidewalks were littered with glass shards.Liza Moody, 23, a student who lives nearby, saw the buildings collapse. First the sides blew out under the weight of the upper floors, she said, and then the buildings crashed down. “It looked like the twin towers, just not so tall,” she said.Neighbors shaken from their beds or preparing to leave for work poured into the street. Some thought of terrorists or an earthquake. What they found were heaps of burning rubble 15 feet high where the two buildings — one new, the other ready for the wrecking ball — had stood side by side.Rodney Wright heard moans coming from under one of the piles.I said, ‘Keep making noise so we can find you,’” Mr. Wright, 39, recalled. “I couldn’t see him. I just heard him.”
Mr. Wright and a dozen other neighbors struggled to lift away large chunks of wood and found the trapped man lying on his stomach, horribly burned, his T-shirt singed off and shards of glass protruding from his skin.Shivering flames lapped dangerously close to the prone man. One neighbor ran up with a fire extinguisher and held the flames at bay. “We saw the fire was getting critical, so we had to lift to get him out,” said Muk Williams.Charles Gardner said the debris was so heavy he almost gave up trying to lift it. But he said the sight of the trapped man gave him strength. “I was thinking about saving somebody’s life,” he said. “I hope somebody would do that for me.”As the men toiled to lift the debris, other neighbors pushed back a large navy blue van that seemed dangerously close to the fire. It belonged to the security guard inside the house.As Kassan Camacho joined in, the neighbors at last pulled the moaning man from the wreckage by his arms, just as the first emergency vehicles — fire engines, police cars and ambulances — began to arrive in a chorus of wailing sirens. The man was wheeled on a stretcher into an ambulance and driven away. The neighbors who saved him did not know his name.)
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did this make national news?
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