WESTMINSTER, Colo. — Nearly six months have passed since a deadly home explosion rocked a Westminster neighborhood in the middle of the night, and still, neighbors face the rubble and debris every day they look out their windows.
“It’s disgusting,” said Corinne Anaya, who lives just down the street from the explosion site. “When it rains and then it gets hot and the Sun beats down on it, it stinks. This is a true biohazard.”
An official cause of the explosion was not determined due to the extensive amount of damage and debris spread, according to the Westminster Fire Department. Natural gas and power utilities had been shut off by Xcel Energy several months before the explosion, and the property was officially listed as vacant. However, neighbors told Denver7 that squatting was a constant problem at the property.
The explosion caused extensive damage to the two homes immediately next to it, leaving them uninhabitable and displacing the residents of each. For other neighbors on the block, the looming rubble has led to intense anger and fears of health impacts.
Anaya said she and her family live with trauma from the experience, waking up around 2:30 a.m. each night — the time they were jolted out of bed by the explosion that February night.
“I think it’s part of the PTSD, the shock,” she said. “I mean, our house shook.”
The pile of rubble sitting across from her home serves as a constant reminder of that night, she said, and adds to her family’s trauma.
Anaya and her neighbors have been pleading with city leaders for months to address the problem. Westminster City Councilmember Obi Ezeadi told Denver7 the clean-up has been stalled due to legal hold-ups with insurance providers, property owners and concerns over asbestos in the debris. The fact that the property was officially categorized as vacant at the time of the explosion adds to the complexity, he said. However, after hearing his constituents tell him about their anger and pain, he said enough was enough.
“They felt voiceless. They felt unheard,” Ezeadi said. “Imagine if you were pregnant and you lived on this block, and there’s this pile of asbestos next to you. How would you want your neighbors to help you? It’s up to us, I think, to clean this up and see how we can help this neighborhood heal.”
The Westminster City Council committed to cleaning up the site at the end of July, allocating $400,000 of rollover funds from previous years. Clean up is scheduled to begin Aug. 24, and is expected to take up to two weeks, Ezeadi said.
For the neighbors, it can’t come soon enough.
“How do you make something like this go away in your memories, especially when you have to stare at it every day?” Anaya pleaded. “How do you make that go away? So, my hope is that in a year’s time, we have our peace back. My neighbors have their homes back, we have our peace back, and we can have the camaraderie that we once had back. That’s what I want.”