Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Year : 1, Issue : 19
An explosion at a historic Texas hotel on Monday injured more than 20 people and trapped some in the basement before they were found by rescue crews, authorities said. One person was in critical condition.
Fort Worth fire department spokesperson Craig Trojacek said investigators are confident the blast was “some kind of gas explosion”. The 20-story Sandman Signature hotel in the heart of downtown Fort Worth was undergoing construction.
Aerial footage showed debris from a hotel scattered across downtown streets, with authorities describing the scene as a “major incident”. Video showed what looked like large sections of a building in the middle of the street.
The Sandman Signature hotel is in a busy area of downtown, about one block from the Fort Worth Convention Center. Firefighters could be seen picking their way through the piles of drywall, shattered glass and mangled metal that coated the street outside the hotel. Authorities urged people to avoid the area.
According to the hotel website, the Sandman Signature Fort Worth Downtown Hotel has 245 rooms and was built in 1920 as the “Waggoner Building”, named after cattle rancher and oilman William Thomas Waggoner. The building has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979.
Source: The Guardian/AP contributed reporting
