Mom Killed in Queens Home Explosion
AP
Firefighters and emergency personnel respond to the scene of the explosion.
A two-story home exploded Friday in a thunderous blast that shook the neighborhood and killed a Queens mother who was inside the home.
Con Edison was in the neighborhood inspecting a gas leak, The Daily News reported Saturday. A utility worker had just lifted a manhole cover when the house on 260th Street exploded, causing debris and pieces of the home to launch into the air. A piece of roof landed in the trees.
Firefighters found the body of Ghanwatti Boodram, who lived in the house, in the rubble four hours after the 4:50 p.m. explosion, officials said.
"She came home from work and was about to pick up her kids from school. A few minutes later and the kids would have been home," said Esau Hanis, 52, a retired Marine who lives nearby.
Boodram was the mother of three sons. Her widowed husband said he was at work when the explosion happened.
"She most wonderful woman you could ever imagine," Dindial Boodram, 46, said. His wife was a nurse at Roosevelt Hospital. Boodram is a surgical technologist at Jamaica Hospital.
"My sons aren't taking it very well," he said. "We are not very fine right now."
Con Ed was called to the neighborhood when Stanley Barth, a neighbor of Boodram, noticed the electricity in the front rooms of his home were not working. When the utility worker checked the basement there was evidence of a gas leak. The worker went across the street to inspect the manhole.
Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert said it's too early to tell if removing the manhole cover caused the blast.
"There are scores of things that can trigger this, but what would need to have happened is a spark in the sewer," Olert said. "Our guys open manholes on a regular basis."
The explosion rocked the tree-lined block and fire soared into the sky.
Gray smoke billowed from the scene as firefighters worked to put out the blaze amid piles of wreckage. Two houses on either side were badly damaged by fire and were likely to be condemned, firefighters said.
Rudi Falsetti, who lives on the next block said, "the whole block shook."
"I was laying in my bed watching television, and I heard a loud explosion," he said. "And I opened my back door to look out, and I saw debris flying in the air, smoke and fire."
A resident of a neighboring house that caught fire, a Consolidated Edison utility worker and four firefighters were being treated for injuries that didn't appear to be life-threatening, fire department Chief of Operations Patrick McNally said.
"We're working with the fire department to determine what happened," Olert said.
The house was in the Floral Park section, a middle-class neighborhood of Cape Cod homes and townhouses with yards, unlike other neighborhoods where buildings are crammed together in rows.
There had been no complaints of gas leaks on the block since 2007, Con Ed section manager Bill Horgan said.
