Bethel-Tate Fire Chief Christopher Cooper said crews were dispatched to the home on Joy Vic Drive at around 8:44 a.m. Tuesday morning. The home was severely damaged and still actively burning when WCPO crews arrived.
Cooper said the explosion was strong enough that it sent debris throughout the neighborhood and caused minor damage to nearby homes.
That debris field is apparent in the body camera footage, which shows insulation and parts of the house spread into several surrounding yards.
As a Clermont County sheriff’s deputy approaches the home, a loud and repetitive popping sound can be heard.
“I believe there’s ammunition cooking off inside the residence,” the deputy says on the body camera footage.
He approaches a neighbor’s home and asks them if the owners of the burning home had ammunition inside, but they told him they weren’t certain.
“You might want to watch out, because I had a, I think a round or something hit my car when I pulled up,” said the deputy.
The neighbor agreed and said something similar had hit his vehicle while the fire burned.
The deputy then jogged toward other emergency personnel closer to the burning home to notify them that he’d believed the popping sound was ammunition.
Neighbors near the home that day said at least a portion of the home exploded, making a noise so loud it woke them up.
“Roughly 9 o’clock, I was sleeping, got woke by a huge explosion,” said Derrick Gullett, a neighbor who lives nearby. “Fell out of bed, come outside, seen a gentleman running from the residence that was currently working inside the residence. It’s shocking. His hair was still on fire when he was out.”
Gullett said the man told him he’d been working inside on the home’s furnace when “all of a sudden it popped and exploded.”
The explosion has left the community in shock — some are still unable to process what has happened.
“Wake up make the coffee, then you know you come home and ... some of your neighbors are gone,” said Keith Lampkin, who lives a few houses down from the explosion. “It’s just weird, it’s just really bizarre.”
Some neighbors said the result of the explosion looked like something you see during war while others said it was nothing they could have imagined.
“You know, how bad could it be? And then when you’re there there’s just a crater, and it’s just like ‘Oh, this was actually much worse than I thought it was gonna be,’” Lampkin said.
The League for Animal Welfare in Batavia said there are cats that survived the explosion. Two of those cats, they said, are at their shelter. Two more could be coming later.
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