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Blast levels Girard home
Girard House Explosion
Gallery
A House on the Corner of Townsend and Washington Streets in Girard Exploded Thursday, July 18, 2008 around 6:30 p.m. Photographers James Hughes and Steve Meyers contributed to this slide show.
Girard Explosion
Video
By DAN BRITT
The blast shook the police station nearly eight blocks away and threw debris over homes in a four-block radius.
GIRARD — A house on the corner of Townsend and Washington streets exploded around 6 p.m. Thursday, leveling it, setting another home ablaze and causing damage to several nearby houses.
Andy Waller, who lives a mere two lots away, said he was knocked off the couch by the blast.
More concerned than fazed by the boom, he immediately ran into a house next to the one that exploded just minutes before flames engulfed the neighboring home.
Waller and another man helped two elderly women escape from what would become a six-hour inferno.
There was no smoke yet, no fire, but I sensed it coming,” Waller said.
Come it did. At least four engines were on the scene; smoke could be smelled from North Youngstown.
Kitty Diamond, who lives in the neighborhood, heard the blast at her job a mile away on Kline Street.
Girard police officers felt the station rumble nearly eight blocks away. The Girard Fire Department arrived at the home, 820 Washington Ave., and removed the two women and a boy. Neighbors said, however, that the women’s two dogs perished.
The two women rescued were taken by ambulance to St. Elizabeth Health Center, along with two children, Waller said.
Fire crews could not extinguish the flames before the house burned to the ground.
Twisted two-by-fours, whole sheets of plywood, long pieces of siding and shattered cinder blocks and glass covered the street around the house and neighbors’ yards. Most of the houses within a four-block radius were hit by flying debris.
The ranch sitting directly across from the explosion at 135 Townsend Street may have incurred the most damage. The garage was crushed by the blast force. The kitchen and living room look as though they weathered mortar fire. A 3-by-4-foot hole blown in the kitchen offered a grim view of the collapsed garage and a 5-by-6-foot hole opened the living room to the outdoors.
The owner of the home, Bob Delpine, escaped injury by sheer luck. He had been remodeling the kitchen area all day before stepping out for a beer on the porch just after 6 p.m.
“If I were standing there, they would have scraped me off the wall,” Delpine said, pointing to his kitchen sink, now filled with chips of drywall.
He estimated the damage to his house at $50,000, at least.
“That’s not a generous estimate,” he added.
A police report says numerous homes sustained damage near the home, and the nearest homes sustained damage that affected their structural integrity. Homes around 824 Washington Ave. had windows blown out from the blast.