A single-engine airplane crashed right into a waterfront cellular house park in Clearwater, Fla., Thursday night, killing a number of individuals and damaging 4 properties, officers mentioned.
The airplane slammed immediately into one house, Scott Ehlers, the hearth chief in Clearwater, mentioned at a information convention, including that there have been “a number of fatalities, each from the plane and inside the cellular house.”
The crash engulfed a part of the park, Bayside Waters, in flames, and three different cellular properties have been broken, although nobody inside these was injured, Chief Ehlers mentioned.
Movies posted on-line confirmed an orange blaze and a wall of thick smoke billowing over properties. Frances Yont, who lives throughout the road from the crash, informed 10 Tampa Bay, a CBS affiliate, that she might really feel the warmth from the hearth when she ran out of her house in Clearwater, roughly 20 miles west of Tampa.
“Every little thing was popping like propane tanks,” she mentioned. “We couldn’t do something,” she mentioned, including that “it was horrible.”
Fireplace officers have been coordinating with the Nationwide Transportation Security Board and the Federal Aviation Administration for an investigation, Chief Ehlers mentioned.
The Fireplace Division acquired the preliminary name at 7:08 p.m., and crews “shortly extinguished” the blaze after arriving on the park at about 7:15 p.m., Chief Ehlers mentioned.
About the identical time that his division was known as, the chief mentioned, the St. Pete-Clearwater Worldwide Airport, roughly three miles away, had dispatched its personal hearth response automobiles to an “plane having an emergency.”
The pilot had reported a “mayday” over the radio to the airport, he added.
“The plane went off radar about three miles north of the runway, which is on this location right here,” the chief mentioned on the crash website.