Following the April 24 gas explosion in Floral Park that took the life of a mother of three, area residents were evacuated to nearby Public School 115. Shocked, scared and devastated, the neighbors returned to the school on Wednesday evening, May 6, for a “town hall” meeting at which they demanded answers from elected officials, Con Edison and city agencies.
Dindial Boodram and his three sons arrived at the meeting in t-shirts memorializing 40-year-old Ghanwatti – Boodram’s wife and the children’s mother – who was the lone occupant of their 80-50 260th Street home at the time of the blast.
The boys, Ryan, 10, Kevin, 8 and Chris, 7, were a block away from home, at P.S. 115’s after school program, when the late afternoon explosion occurred.
“We actually heard a big boom,” recalled Ryan.
“We were all really scared when we heard it,” Kevin chimed in. “We kept wondering what happened.”
While Boodram admitted the loss of his sons’ mother “didn’t really hit them yet,” the boys said they were saddened and surprised by the news of the explosion and their mother’s death.
“We started crying,” Ryan said after a loud sigh.
Boodram acknowledged that while attending the meeting was difficult, the support of his community is helping him cope.
“They are all behind me,” he added, as area residents, including Stanley and Vita Barth, whose home was also destroyed in the explosion, filed into the school’s auditorium.
The opening moment of silence – presided over by Councilmember David Weprin – was a stark contrast to the rest of the two-hour meeting, at which angry residents pointed fingers at Con Edison for its lack of preparation and its “inadequate” protocol for responding to gas leaks, evacuating those in danger and informing residents of work in their neighborhoods.
The Fire Department also took some heat for a suspected lack of communication with Con Ed and the Department of Buildings was grilled for having inspected just two surrounding houses when, as one resident put it, the blast “shook all the neighborhood.”
“People were scared of more explosions. There might be more leaks, you never know,” said Maria Faraon who, with her husband Danny, lives across the street from the scene of the explosion.
“Oh my God, I thought my whole house was going down. It was a sickening sound,” recalled Danny, who said the blast knocked out his house’s windows, shattered a side door and cracked ceilings and walls.
According to Michael Clendenin, Con Edison’s Director of Media Relations, the mechanic dispatched to the scene on April 24 found a dime-sized hole in the two-inch-wide gas main across the street from the Boodrams’ home. While Clendenin and other Con Edison officials said the investigation is ongoing, he speculated that the leak might have traveled through a conduit into the home, causing the explosion.
The mechanic, who called for backup prior to the blow, had to “determine the extent of migration” of the gas, instead of evacuating “the wrong houses,” Con Ed’s Vice President of Gas Engineering, David Davidowitz, said in response to a resident’s suggestion that Ghanwatti’s life could have been saved.
For her part, Borough President Helen Marshall, who accompanied Weprin at the podium throughout the meeting, called on Con Ed to “improve its procedures for responding to gas explosions” and change its evacuation protocol. She also said a “community task force” to address the incident was in order.
Davidowitz said Con Ed would undergo “a lot of internal soul searching,” closely examining its procedures.
Indeed, the call for action was the theme of the night, brought to a crescendo when Boodram – who had remained quiet and at one point, covered his face in his hands to mask his tears – left his seat and, frustrated by the panelists’ handling of residents’ questions, grabbed a microphone floating through the crowd.
“How many of us must die in order to get changes?” he asked to impassioned applause from the crowd. If the city and Con Ed’s response procedures had been streamlined before April 24, he proclaimed, “My wife would be here today.”
