The morning after an explosion ravaged a mall in Plantation and wounded 23 people, clean-up work was already underway at 10 am, the broken windows had been covered with cardboard and the pieces of broken glass had been swept away and placed in small piles.
The deputy chief of Plantation Fire Department, Joel Gordon, said that 21 of the 23 injured people were discharged from the hospital on Sunday morning and that the man who had fatal injuries on Saturday is already in stable condition.
The cause of the explosion is still unknown, he said.
“The state fire chief and the rest of our investigators have just begun the investigation,” he said. “It could be that in a day or two” the results are published.
A construction company hired by the owner of the shopping center picked up the debris from the store fronts, while the tenants picked up the screws and roof tiles from the explosion inside the tents.
“All the porters fell off the wall,” said Amanda Silvester, manager of the F45 training gym at the Fountains Mall, in front of the blast site, which was so strong that it ripped part of the brick facade off the walls.
She and her husband, Ivan Santo, arrived Sunday morning to fix the gym and prepare to open on Monday.
“Everything looks good,” she said. “Nobody forbade us to open up as soon as possible.”
His business partner was in the square on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., when a possible gas leak caused an explosion that threw debris 90 meters away. It is believed that the disaster originated in an ex pizzeria.
One of the former owners of the pizzeria, real estate agent Real Perla Burzstein, said that PizzaFire closed in December, but refused to answer any other questions. A representative of the mall did not respond to any phone calls this Sunday.
Plantation firefighters said a center set up on Saturday for families to look for family members closed the same night. The Market mall remains closed on Sunday, Gordon said.
Plantation police kept the blast scene closed on Sunday morning, and a few cars remained in the parking lot closed with caution tape. Gordon said that the owners of the cars in Tesla’s cargo lot could recover their vehicles on Sunday.
The other side of the explosion, near Publix, was surrounded by a metal fence on Sunday morning and a crowd of people was waiting to retrieve their cars.
Antonio Ferreira, 42, was training at the LA Fitness gym on Saturday morning when the explosion occurred.
“In my mind, seriously, I thought everyone was dead,” he said. “I thought it was a plane crash.” He said he ran out of the building, under the collapsed roof, passing the people who were bleeding and through the cloud of dust. Lego ran past his car, which he noticed had shattered windows and a piece of debris on top.
“This could have been much, much worse,” he said. “It’s a miracle that nobody died.”
