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At least six injured in Norfolk house explosion

E-mail|Link July 30, 2010 05:17 PM

By Meghan Irons, Globe Staff

NORFOLK -- At least six people were injured today when a house under construction exploded in flames.

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The blast occurred shortly before 12:30 p.m. in a housing development complex for people 55 and older. One man, believed to be a construction worker, was trapped inside the rubble and it took several firefighters 45 minutes to excavate him, a fire official said. He was Medflighted to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston along with two other people. Their conditions are not known.

Three other people were also taken by ambulance to different hospitals.

Norfolk Fire Chief Cole Bushnell said firefighters arrived at the duplex at the Village at River's Edge development to find the house completely engulfed.

“The conditions at the scene were overwhelming at that point,” he said.

Neighbors said no one was living in the condominium at 28 Wildwood at the time because it was being worked on. They said another woman was living on the other side of the duplex that was damaged by the blast, but she apparently was fine.

State Fire Marshal Steven D. Coan said it was too soon to tell the cause of the blast.

“It’s too early to speculate on the potential cause or if there was propane or other gases in the explosions,” Coan said.

Norfolk Town Administrator Jack Hathaway said, "The house is gone. It's literally gone. … I think it just kind of disintegrated, to tell you the truth."

Hathaway said he lived three-quarters of a mile away and felt the explosion at his house.

Lorelei Margeson, 66, who lives a few houses farther down Winterberry, said the explosion happened a little before 12:30 p.m. The neighborhood is a new development for people over 55, and the explosion happened in an area where work was being done on a new duplex condominium, she said.

“We felt and heard a huge explosion,” Margeson said. “It shook the house.”

Patricia Kiggen, another neighbor, said she and her husband had also heard and felt the explosion. "It was a booming sound that shook the whole house. Papers and insulation were flying from the sky. It was almost like 9/11. It was awful,” she said. Ambulances responded to the scene from towns all around.

“There’s an occupant in one side, and they were building on the other side and it blew up," she said.

Al Rao, who works for Prudential Page Realty, which is selling the units in the complex for DiPlacido Development Corp., said contractors had been working on that unit, and some workers were in the basement working on the heating and air conditioning system.

"Our main concern is with the health and safety and well-being of the people who are injured," he said. That's Priority No. 1, obviously."

A message left for DiPlacido Development Corp. wasn't immediately returned.

Martin Finucane of the Globe staff and Globe correspondents L. Finch and Jeff Fish contributed to this report.