Fire and rescue officials arrived at the Pacific Oaks Condominium in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on Wednesday morning following reports of an explosion and found a massive fire raging inside of several collapsed housing units.
Video from the scene showed flames leaping up the wreckage and black smoke billowing into the sky.
"It felt like we were bombed,” a man who lives nearby told local media. "My heart goes out to everyone."
Video later emerged of the explosion from a nearby security camera, but it did not capture an image of the fireball itself.
The situation was described by local media as a “mass casualty incident,” and 10 people were transported to area hospitals with injuries, four of whom were children, with two of the adults suffering from traumatic injuries. However, there were no reported deaths when this story went to print.
Most of the blaze was reportedly quelled by firefighters in about 40 minutes, although a small gas-fueled fire in the basement of the building persisted for several hours.
Montgomery County Fire and Rescue told media there was no firm conclusion about the cause of the fire, and Washington Gas said it had turned off natural gas to the area. Locals said they had smelled gas prior to the explosion, but no call to 911 emergency services was ever placed.
The blast has damaged some 24 units in four separate buildings, which had all been evacuated.
A nearby school, Brown Station Elementary, was not affected by the blast, but students were dismissed early on Wednesday, with several of them living in the community.
The explosion was the third in an apartment building in Montgomery County since 2016, when a massive explosion in Silver Spring leveled an entire apartment complex, killing seven people. According to an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, that explosion was caused by a faulty vent and regulator on a gas line.
Another blast occurred in nearby Lyttonsville in March 2022, hospitalizing 10 people and displacing more than 100. The cause was later determined to be a gas pipe.
As Sputnik has reported, the country’s gas infrastructure is aging and brittle, with the DoT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) burdened by a shortage of regulators to monitor safety and a set of regulations written under the watchful eye of the industrial giants they are expected to oversee - a situation one watchdog characterized as “like the fox designing the hen house."