STAMFORD, Conn. — An explosion Tuesday leveled a six-bedroom house in Stamford, scattering debris hundreds of feet away. Nobody was inside the house at the time and there were no serious injuries, authorities said.
The homeowner was outside near a pool house on the property at the time of the explosion, according to Stamford’s director of public safety, Ted Jankowski. The homeowner was alert and conscious when emergency crews arrived and he was taken to a hospital for observation.
“I thought a plane hit my house,” Charlene Heffernan, who lives next door, told The Stamford Advocate. “I have never heard anything so loud. My house shook from the top down.”
Mayor Michael Pavia said the cause of the blast is under investigation, but authorities suspected gas was involved. He said a 500-gallon propane gas tank on site was under a controlled burn Tuesday afternoon.
The explosion left nothing standing of the 6,000-square-foot home in north Stamford. Debris landed hundreds of feet from the house and three other homes in the neighborhood also caught fire.
“The whole house was gone,” neighbor Antonio Pisanelli told The Hour of Norwalk. “There was just a big hole.”
Fire and emergency personnel from around Fairfield County and New York’s Westchester County responded to the blast.
Real estate records show the home has more than 6,000 feet of living space and last sold in 2006 for $1.1 million.