ENERGY, Ill. — A southern Illinois man was killed in a residential explosion on Tuesday, authorities said.
Dave Turner, 77, of Energy, died when the building exploded at about 7:08 p.m. CT, the Williamson County Sheriff’s Office said. The explosion leveled the home and scattered debris in the yard, WPSD reported. Some nearby homes also sustained some damage, according to the television station.
“The preliminary investigation has resulted in the discovery of a significant blast radius resulting in one fatality,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
According to KFVS, Williamson County Sheriff Jeff Diederich said on Wednesday that the explosion was consistent with a gas or propane incident. He added that a final conclusion will not be reached until an investigation is completed.
Tracy Morning, who lives across the street from Turner, said he was pulling into his apartment complex when he saw the explosion.
“I just drove past the house and pulled right in,” Morning told The Southern Illinoisan. “As soon as I stopped and parked, I opened my door and it (house) blew up.”
Windows in Morning’s apartments and his neighbors’ were broken, he told the newspaper.
“The explosion was literally like how a nuke would be animated on a show,” Morning told The Southern Illinoisan. “It was just fire and debris. That’s the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.”
Morning said he considers himself lucky the explosion had not happened seconds before it did, when he was driving on College Street right past the house.
“When I was coming out of the car, it knocked me off balance,” Morning said. “I thought it was an earthquake until I saw the debris flying.”
Another neighbor, Mark Redfearn, said he originally believed that a substation down the street had exploded. He told WPSD that the force of the blast damaged parts of his residence.
“It had knocked everything I had in the garage off the shelves,” Redfearn said. “There’s not a wall in my house that doesn’t have a crack in it. The more time goes on, the more damage is popping up. The structure of the house is compromised.”
Redfearn said that Turner, a retired contractor who would have celebrated his birthday this weekend was “one of the best neighbors a person could ever want.”
“There was nothing you could ask him to do that he wouldn’t at least attempt to do,” Redfearn told WPSD.
Cassandra Dann said she was in the back of her house when she heard the explosion, telling the television station that she thought “a tree had fallen through the house.”
“We noticed the closet had fallen, the attic fan had dropped and there was shattered glass in the kitchen,” told WPSD. As we walked through the home, we were looking for this tree.”
Dann added that she was devastated to learn that Turner had been killed by the blast.
“Dave was a retired contractor, so he’s the best neighbor to have because he knew everything,” Dann told the television station. “It’s still very hard to understand what had happened, and we’re all just trying to make sense of it.”
“This remains a rapidly evolving incident,” Diederich said in a statement posted on social media.
Investigators are working with the Office of the Illinois State Fire Marshal to determine the cause and origin of the explosion, The Southern Illinoisan reported.
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