July 12, 2000
Three Are Missing After Explosion in a Brooklyn Building
By ANDY NEWMAN and SARAH KERSHAW
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Photographs by Ruby Washington/The New York Times
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A building in the Boerum Hill section was destroyed, and its neighbor damaged, after an explosion on Tuesday. Three people were presumed dead.
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• Residents' Thoughts Turn to Missing Couple (July 12, 2000)
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eonard and Harriet Walit smelled gas.
They returned home to 420 State Street in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn around 7:45 p.m. yesterday and were greeted by its familiar, disconcerting odor, said Julian Jackson, who lives next door at No. 418.
The Walits phoned next door and asked Mr. Jackson's companion of 53 years, Khay Cochran, to come and see what was the matter, Mr. Jackson said. Mr. Cochran, one of the Walits' dearest friends, complied.
Seconds later, the entire block shook with an enormous explosion and a dense, blinding cloud of black dust filled the air.
When it settled, 420 State Street, a three-story, red-brick, turn-of-the-century townhouse on a peaceful, tidy block near Brooklyn's downtown, was nothing but a pile of beams and bricks. Mr. Jackson, 78, found himself sitting unhurt but stunned in a house that was suddenly missing a back wall.
A houseguest at 418, Francis Aguire, who had followed Mr. Cochran over to
the Walits' but was between houses when the explosion happened, stood
bewildered on the sidewalk.
On Wednesday morning, firefighters, emergency workers and trained dogs were still picking and pawing through the rubble, looking for Mr. Walit, 72, Mrs. Walit, 66, and Mr. Cochran or, more likely, their remains.
The cause of the blast was not immediately clear. A fire official said that a construction crew working on a school across the street from the building had been digging in the street with jackhammers around 4 p.m. and might have hit a gas line leading to the buildings. Members of the crew were being interviewed by fire marshals last night, the official said.
Someone -- either the Walits or a neighbor -- had called and reported the gas odor to the fire department shortly before the explosion, a city official said. A fire truck was already on its way to State Street when the building blew up, the official said.
Long into the night, the search for the victims continued. Firefighters standing atop the story-high heap of debris removed it brick by brick. Other firefighters snaked fiber-optic cables with tiny cameras at the ends of them between the bricks, searching down into the rubble for any survivors. A crane so tall that it scraped off the tops of the trees that line the block was brought to the scene around 11 p.m.
Sgt. Tom Collins of the Police Department's Emergency Service Unit said that firefighters had to remove the rubble with tremendous care, lest it tumble down on anyone trapped inside.
"It's like a domino effect," he said. "One thing goes, it's all going to start to go."
One firefighter, whose arm was injured, was treated at Long Island College Hospital.
Hours after the explosion, smaller clouds of dust still floated around the buildings and the smell of gas hung in the air. Firetrucks and police cars lined the streets, blocking off Atlantic Avenue, and many other blocks.
The place where the Walits lived was not recognizable as anything that had ever been a dwelling. The only intact house-like thing visible from the street was a single white shutter. The facade of No. 418, also a three-story brick house, was still standing, but officials said it was so badly damaged inside that it would have to be demolished.
Mr. Jackson, a retired lawyer who was the city's Corporation Counsel from 1962 to 1989, sat in a plastic chair on the sidewalk, counting what he had lost -- in addition to his lover, the collection of antiques and art that filled what they called their "country house," as distinct from their apartment in Manhattan.
"My whole life was in there," he said.
Noreen Davidsen, 58, the Walits' sole tenant, lost everything she had, too. Her life was spared because she had left earlier in the day for her vacation house in Ocean Grove on the Jersey Shore.
Between sobs during a telephone conversation with a reporter, Ms. Davidsen said she had no insurance.
"I'm wiped out," she said.
But she was more concerned for the Walits. Mrs. Walit is a retired social worker; Mr. Walit a retired accountant.
"Harriet and Leonard, they're like my family," Ms. Davidsen said.
A friend of the Walits, Kristen Austin, said that moments before the collapse, the couple had helped a neighbor carry her baby and groceries into her house.
"Our only hope is that they were in the ground-floor apartment in the basement," she said. "Maybe they're downstairs and they're O.K."
But a fire official said the likelihood of finding survivors was "pretty remote."
The collapse took place on a street of townhouses that in recent years had been awarded boroughwide recognition for "greening up" by residents.
Karen Richter, 51, who has lived across the street for 25 years, said that the Walits had moved in several years before her. She said they had seen their block, once seedy and dotted with rooming houses, completely transformed.
"There were a lot of Native Americans -- Mohawks who helped build the bridges," she said. "People who couldn't afford Brooklyn Heights bought over here. Houses that we all paid $25,000 for are now going for $600,000."
Ms. Richter said she heard the explosion while watching television.
"It was like the third world war," she said, "this tremendous crash. I thought a bomb went off."
Ms. Richter ran to the front door and saw so much thick, acrid smoke that she could not see her hand in front of her face, she said.
"Then I got out on the sidewalk and it started to clear," she said, "and then I could see there was no house there."
Shortly before 2 a.m., Mr. Jackson was still sitting in the chair on the sidewalk as neighbors tried to console him. He wasn't going anywhere, he said.
"I'm just going to stay here until I know what happened to Khay."
