Apartment City

WASHINGTON (ABC7) — The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has released a painstakingly detailed progress report chocked -full of new facts pertaining to last summer's Silver Spring apartment explosion . The report, which does not identify a cause or assign blame, contains 108 documents, including transcribed witness interviews , vivid investigatory photographs and fire department call logs . One witness parked his car along Arliss Street on the night of August 10, 2016. He recollected seeing a sudden "white flash" and feeling a "shock wave" overcome his body. The sheer force of the blast shattered some of the man's car windows and even dented one of his car doors. “There was a flash, there was shock wave," the man, who suffered a minor cut near his right ear, told investigators. “I must tell you that the explosion came from the apartment on the first floor. There were two apartments on top of it that basically went down on it.” A second male...

Federal investigators said they found a disconnected vent pipe in the basement room where natural gas built up before a lethal explosion last year at a Silver Spring apartment complex . They have not determined when the pipe was disconnected, why or who did it, but the disconnect would have bypassed a safety feature meant to vent gas from the basement room of the building to the exterior, investigators with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote in a preliminary report on the Aug. 10, 2016, explosion that killed seven people, injured more than 30 and left more than 100 homeless. “The person who disconnected the vent pipe, as well as his/her intentions in doing so, are as of yet to be determined,” investigators wrote in a preliminary report that was made public Tuesday . ATF investigators, who are working with the National Transportation Safety Board in its investigation of the incident, said that the cause of the explosion and fire that followed are undete...