The Cedar-Riverside Explosion, Eight Years On
9th July 2022
Early in the morning on New Year’s Day in 2014 I was looking through the online news, as was my habit. I came across an article about an explosion and fire in the Cedar-Riverside district of Minneapolis, which was suspected to have been caused by a gas leak. As I skimmed through the text, I noticed that the damaged building was said to be “next door to a mosque”. That got my attention — the blast must have been in “Little Mogadishu” — so I read the article more closely and looked at some of the news videos.
My suspicions were aroused by the appearance of the building after the explosion, before firemen brought the blaze under control. It didn’t look like a gas explosion, which typically blows out all the walls and collapses the roof onto the rubble. When that happens, most of the ambient oxygen is consumed by the initial blast, and there’s usually very little fire afterwards in the remaining rubble.
That’s not what happened on Cedar Avenue that bitterly cold New Year’s morning. An intense explosion blew out the windows of the second floor and propelled debris across the street (as well as the legless body of one of the victims, according to early reports that were later scrubbed from the web), but the walls remained intact. A fire burned fiercely afterwards, consuming all the flammable material in the building, including the roof. It took firemen a couple of days to extinguish the blaze completely.
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In the end the building was razed and the rubble carted away, destroying any possibility of a real investigation. The official cover story was a “gas leak”, never mind the gas utility’s vehement insistence that their monitoring equipment showed definitively that their system experienced no leaks whatsoever that morning.