A horrific explosion ripped through the sleepy English hamlet of Middlesbrough on Tuesday the 18th of June, destroying one unit of a semi-detached home. CCTV cameras nearby to the conflagration caught the flames erupting outwards from the structure’s windows before the entire house was engulfed by a thick cloud of smoke.
Terrifically loud crashes and bangs rang across the neighborhood as debris falling from the sky in a scene that one neighborhood resident described as “absolute carnage.
Police have the cause of the unexpected blast under investigation.
A 57 year-old man, who was identified as the homeowner, was pulled from the rubble by a neighborhood hero—45 year-old Kayfee Hameed—and airlifted by emergency services personnel to a nearby hospital, where he is currently listed in critical condition. When asked what prompted his actions, Hameed said that everyone was just standing around watching as he drove by the scene. When he saw the fire he stopped his car and jumped out to help, but everyone watching was begging him not to go into the burning building. He says that he ran inside anyway, calling out for survivors. There he found a man whose leg was buried under a pile of rocks. He managed to extract the man from the structure and set him on some nearby grass. When he did, all the man’s sloughed off of his leg “like a carrier bag.”
Hameed, who is a roofer by trade, said that he didn’t find anyone else in the house. He also checked two neighboring properties that had been damaged in the blast, looking for other casualties.
Sean Joseph, whose house backs up to the site of the blast, said that he was doing his work-from-home job when he heard the blast, which he mistook for a jet airliner crashing into the ground.
A spokesman for the local police department says that law enforcement has cordoned off the area, and that an investigation is in progress.
