Justin Bullock, FISM News
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A massive fireworks explosion shook a Los Angeles neighborhood on Wednesday injuring 17 people and causing damage to nearby cars and buildings. Ten police officers were among those injured.
The explosion came from 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks that were seized by police earlier the same day. The police officers were in the process of trying to safely dispose of the fireworks by detonating them in a large metal container designed for such disposal, but the explosion turned out to be bigger than expected and destroyed the metal container, radiated outwards and damaged vehicles and buildings and injured police and bystanders.
The police initially put ten pounds of the fireworks into the disposal truck to detonate. Police said that they did not transport the fireworks to a different location out of fear that some of the fireworks could explode en route. In addition, the police told the press that they had gone door to door in order to evacuate the neighborhood but some people did not answer the door and remained in their homes. Even though 16 of the 17 injured had to be hospitalized, the injuries were mostly mild in nature and not life threatening.
Neighborhood residents who were still in their homes felt the explosion while going about their daily routine. They described the explosion as massive and said that it felt like an earthquake. Windows were blown out of buildings along the neighborhood street and multiple cars were flipped over in the shockwave. Many residents who were still in their homes immediately rushed out to see what had happened.
CBS Los Angeles had a news helicopter over the sight of the explosion and tweeted a video of the explosion,
WATCH: Sky9 was overhead when police attempted to detonate a stash of illegal fireworks that ended in an explosion in the 700 block of East 27th Street in South L.A. https://t.co/KpWiAEoyqv pic.twitter.com/UbIXLDoZjh
— KCAL News (@kcalnews) July 1, 2021
Lt. Raul Jovel told CBS Los Angeles,
Officers went door-to-door. After the explosion, they discovered that some folks were still in the vicinity that did not answer the door. And that’s how we discovered that some folks were injured… There’s certain limits as to us going into homes in different situations. In that situation, whoever was in charge felt that it was safe to detonate it. They followed the procedures in place… When the techs find a substance that’s really volatile, and very dangerous, they try to detonate in place because its just too dangerous to transport on a normal vehicle because of, obviously, (the risk of) an explosion. They made that decision to detonate it in place. There’s certain criteria on the substance and the circumstances of that.