A massive gas explosion leveled a Queens home before dawn Thursday, sending eight New York City police officers flying through the air and injuring them as they arrived to investigate a report of a knife-wielding man and the odor of gas. The officers were treated for minor injuries — including burns and at least one head laceration — and all of the people who had been inside the building were eventually accounted for, although several were taken to a hospital, police said.
“I want to be clear: We got very lucky today,” Assistant Chief Christopher McIntosh of the New York Police Department told reporters hours after the blast. “This could have turned out really differently.”
Body camera video released by the department shows officers approaching a small home in Queens shortly before 3 a.m. As one officer begins to open the door, an enormous explosion erupts, blowing out windows and hurling the officers backward across a yard and into a gate. The video then shows the officers struggling to their feet amid smoke and debris, checking on one another.
“You guys good?” one officer can be heard asking.
Roughly a minute later, the footage cuts to an officer helping two young children out of the home while other residents stagger out behind them.
McIntosh said the man who drew the police response had arrived at the home intoxicated, carrying a knife and two garbage bags filled with canisters containing what he described only as an “unknown substance.” The man forced his way into a basement apartment — by pushing in an air conditioning unit — where his wife, daughter, and two grandchildren were living. The family fled before officers got there, McIntosh said.
The man remained unaccounted for as of Thursday afternoon, and police had not released his identity. The home collapsed in the explosion, and authorities said several neighboring houses were also damaged. All of the injured officers were expected to recover, McIntosh said.
“Thankfully, today, luck was on their side,” he said of the officers.