Lake View, N.Y. (WBEN) - A home explosion Monday night rocked the residents of the Lake View community, leaving a 78-year-old woman dead and her 78-year-old husband in the hospital in critical condition.
The explosion took place shortly after 8:30 p.m. at a home on West Lane that caused total destruction to the house, and extensive damage to a number of other residences in the neighborhood. One of the homes directly adjacent to the explosion was also a total loss after a fire broke out as a result of the debris.
The response to the home explosion and subsequent fire from emergency crews throughout the area was immediate, with more than 20 different agencies and around 200 emergency personnel. Those first responders included volunteer firefighters, paramedics, local police officers, and others like State Fire and the Collapse Rescue Team from the Buffalo Fire Department.
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Sean Crotty, emergency manager from the Town of Hamburg, says it takes a strong team effort like Monday in order to properly respond to such an incident.
"This is certainly not an incident that you see every day," said Crotty in an interview with WBEN. "You may have an explosion that impacts one residence, but this impacted three with very, very heavily damaged structures, and then adjacent structures as well. So when you look at that, you have a lot of assets operating in a lot of different places, so you have to coordinate that response and break it off into divisions so that you have needs of those responders in each division or building that they're operating in."
Crotty had a number of crews with different operations in response to the house explosion, which ranged from fire suppression to rescue operations, as well as fire investigation to monitoring air quality in the neighborhood.
In response to an emergency of this magnitude, Crotty feels it's important for managers like himself to keep a 'Mile High' view.
"We have to look at what is going on. I always refer to it as like a CAN Report: Conditions, Actions, Need. This is what's going on, this is what we're looking to do, this is what we need to do it," Crotty explained. "So when we have those identified and we can look at it objectively and say, 'Hey, this is what we have going on in this division, a firefight in this one building. We need to work on getting an elevated master stream there, so we need to get we need to get those resources, but we also have to make sure we leave room on very narrow streets.' Thankfully, this is spring/summer time. It's not winter time, where these roads are even more narrow."
Another important aspect of emergency response in this instance is coordination, collaboration and cooperation with all the agencies he deals with on a regular basis.
"We train with each other, we work together. It's not the first time we meet," Crotty explained. "So when we make decisions, like when we called Buffalo in, they have a Collapse Rescue Team. That's a very specialized piece, and we still have a victim that we're trying to locate. So we called them in, and they came out and handled that operation. So there's a lot of multiple facets that go into it, and we just have to make sure that we don't rely on the same resource for multiple different operations. And that's why we reach out to mutual aid partners outside of just our community."
While Crotty acknowledges there is no set plan to respond to house explosions, especially one of this caliber, he says it's important to be as prepared as possible for any emergency to unfold.
"It's really important to get that training," Crotty noted. "We break it down into pieces. We eat the elephant one bite at a time. We look at the big picture, we keep the big picture, but then we look at and say, 'This division, we need to do this.' In this instance, this house was on fire. We needed to work on getting that, and this is what we need to do.
"It's really one of those instances where the sum of all parts is really greater than its whole. So while we don't plan or prepare for the big house explosion that ends up damaging multiple residents around, we break it down in pieces."
Monday night was a bit of a unique situation for Crotty and the Lake View community. While crews were responding to the home explosion on West Lane, there was the call of another fire in Lake View behind a residence with a shed.
That's when standby units, also known as staged apparatus, come into play to assist the fire district or town.
"We know that it's going to take so long for the operation to occur, so we're looking at that piece of the operation. We know that those firefighters are going to be really exerting themselves, so we have EMS on standby for them, we have rehab so that they can go and get hydrated, make sure they stay hydrated, they can get rest, nutrition, and then an ambulance, if they need it. So we stage backups to them," Crotty explained. "[That way], we have crews that are fresh in wait, we had them staged on Route 5, and then we had other crews that were covering the calls for the district, for the town. We have these standby units that are covering calls that would occur. Just because this is going on, it doesn't mean the world stops. So we have other incidents that are going on, and we have those standby crews from other communities that come in and cover."
Before emergency crews were able to arrive on scene of the home explosion on Monday, a number of local residents, some off-duty police officers among others, helped respond at the scene by either checking on neighbors of the houses closest to the blast, or making sure residents did not get too close to the scene.
In the days and weeks to come following this incident, Crotty feels it's important to have friends on the street, especially with something that most people have never experienced.
"This community, this part of our community has suffered a loss, there's a loss of life, so check on each other. Just communicate with each other and just be there for them, listen. And if they want to talk, they talk," he said. "We have services that we have, an emergency service Chaplain that can come in and talk, and we've offered the services to the residents. But it's just important that they know we're here, their friends are here, their family's here. They have their back, because, it is a critical incident that, thankfully, not everybody goes through in her life. But now these people in a flip of that switch, their world flips upside down."
The cause of the home explosion remains under investigation.