Posted on 05/12/2025 6:19:41 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
A New Jersey home exploded overnight, killing two people in a fiery flash that rocked a sleepy neighborhood, officials said.
The bodies of a woman and a man, who had not been publicly identified, were recovered from the remains of the home Sunday along Tranquility Court in Washington Township in Gloucester County, NBC 10 reported.
Neighborhood doorbell cameras captured the moment the South Jersey home suddenly exploded around 2 a.m., with the house completely engulfed in flames in just minutes as first responders raced to the scene.
Officials described the emergency as an “intense fire,” with neighbors confirming that a loud blast rang throughout the neighborhood as they woke up to see flames shooting in all directions from the home.
“I was terrified, absolutely terrified,” neighbor Susan Pinto told the local outlet. “Because I never heard an explosion like that in my life, and it just was, the house was, basically, burning to the ground very, very quickly.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
That’s be my guess.
When we go out of town, we always turn off our gas and water.
Yes, I know they were home. At least when we’re around, we can smell the gas. And I’m up often enough at night that I’d likely catch it before it reached a critical level.
Agree about induction cooktops. We moved from electric coil to induction 5 years ago. A dramatic improvement. Much safer as well.
They had information on Hillary?
Natural gas rises to the top & builds from there. Propane is heavier and builds up from the floor. Interesting that neither one noticed the smell.
Years ago, my neighbor who was a carpenter came over to look at replacing some outside paneling. While on the phone with him, I could hear his wife saying something. Turns out he smelled a gas leak at my house a week earlier when he was checking it out!!
Said it was no big deal since NG rises but when I called the gas company, they told me to evacuate the house, came out within 30 minutes & installed a new gas meter since that’s where the leak came from.
A neighbor’s house blew up like that, but it was a gasoline leak in the garage from a car he was working on during the day. Fortunately, the blast blew down the bedroom ceiling which protected them in bed and gave them time to escape. It was really weird to see a house-shaped fire rising into the sky. The garage door blew across the street and the two cars in the driveway were toast.
Everyone freaked because they thought the couple was still in the house. It turned out they were in the back neighbor’s yard watching the fire.
Yes, that is why they ADD the sulfur to the gas. So you can smell it if there is a leak.
I had a gas(propane) fireplace at my former house. I had the regulator replaced twice because I kept smelling gas outside near the tank. The tech said sometimes the regulator is just faulty.
It was leaking too because they came out to fill the tank in the summer when I had turned it off after filling it in the spring. They ended up crediting me for about $50 of gas that had leaked out when the valve on the tank was turned off.
Gas is much cheaper than electric. I worked in a plant until recently that has been given the mandate from Corporate to start moving all our gas fired equipment to electric to satisfy their ESG commitments. The big hang up is that at a plant that is already the biggest electricity consumer in the county will see a massive increase in utility costs by using electric power in addition to the capital costs of changing over.
Natural gas in this country is cheap and is the source of much of our electricity. Properly installed and maintained it is safe. I recognize the efficiency of heat pumps as my house is all electric, though I question their actual economy and reliability especially with the newer refrigerants and scroll pumps. More expensive to buy and replace and shorter life.
“I was terrified, absolutely terrified,” neighbor Susan Pinto told the the Dateline reporter at NBC.
ISWYDT ...
Not so “tranquil” street.
Gas line or meth lab. Was the dog ok?
Meth lab explosion.
In Chicago and Wisconsin we have gas in virtually every home. Works perfectly. We may lose 2 homes a year. But the other million are fine. Electricity starts far more fires. Our water heaters, furnaces and most of our stoves are heated with gas. I also have two homes. One had gas lit chandlers which were turned to electric 80 years ago. I am far more scared of the electric than I am the gas.
We saw a house blow in Santa Clara about 20 years ago.
Natural gas leak.
I installed a new gas water heater at an older brother’s house a few years back. In talking to the guys at a plumbing supply house I found and used a safety device for the gas line.
The device is small and connects right between the gas line and the extension to whatever appliance the gas is going to.
It operates on a standard in terms of the pressure in the gas line. There is always pressure in the gas line; that’s how it moves through the distribution pipelines into the residential and commercial end-use locations. Even when your gas powered appliance is operating there is still pressure in the supply line, because the rate of use of gas by the appliance is not the same as if the end of the line was merely “open”. A gas leak or a faulty appliance usually can be registered, by this device, as an “open line”. Once this little device detects such a drop in pressure in the gas line, it closes the internal valve it has, shutting the line at that point.
Gas leak or meth lab?
Yes. Example: a propane tank near an unrelated fire may experience a BLEVE. It's certainly not "sudden" in the sense that anybody who knows about the phenomenon will see that it is highly likely and take steps to either prevent it or mitigate the damage it will cause.
As opposed to a house blowing up without giving any external signs that an explosion is imminent.
A gas line was my first guess.
But police say the explosion was “not accidental.”
They opened a criminal investigation.
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