NEW YORK — Hope dimmed as emergency workers continued their search Saturday for two people missing after an apparent gas explosion leveled three Manhattan apartment buildings.
Investigators worked to piece together what caused the blast, which injured 22.
Dogs sniffed for anyone possibly still trapped beneath the heap of loose brick and rubble two days after the explosion. Detectives issued posters seeking information on the whereabouts of two men thought to have been in the sushi restaurant on the ground floor of one of the collapsed buildings: 26-year-old Moises Lucon, who worked at the restaurant, and 23-year-old Nicholas Figueroa, a bowling alley worker who had been there on a date.
Their families frantically searched, showing photos of their loved ones and asking for help.
“We have just been walking down the streets, one by one,” brother Zacarias Lucon told the Daily News of New York. “We are just so exhausted and upset. I don’t know what happened to him.”
Lucon moved to New York about six years ago from Guatemala.
Figueroa’s relatives said they were holding out hope.
“My brother is strong,” Figueroa’s brother Neal told reporters. “Even if he is still in the rubble, I know he would still be in a predicament to get himself out, and so I’m just praying for that.”
As of Saturday, no one else was thought to be missing related to the explosion.
But hope was dimming. Asked about whether anyone would have survived, Joseph Esposito, head of the Office of Emergency Management, said: “I would doubt that very seriously.”
While Mayor Bill de Blasio visited a firehouse to thank some of the hundreds of firefighters who battled Thursday’s massive blaze, heavy equipment plied the mound of rubble Saturday. As some of the evacuated buildings nearby were declared safe for residents to return, Micha Gerland stood at a police barricade and surveyed the remains of his apartment.
“I still don’t believe it,” said Gerland, 37, a restaurant manager who escaped with nothing but his wallet, his phone, his keys and the clothes he was wearing. “Who thinks that something like that happens?”
It’s possible that someone improperly tapped a gas line amid ongoing plumbing and gas work in one of the destroyed buildings, although investigators need to get into the basement to learn more, the mayor said.
Inspectors from the utility company Consolidated Edison had visited that building Thursday about an hour before the explosion and determined work to upgrade gas service didn’t pass inspection, locking the line to ensure it wouldn’t be used and then leaving, officials said.
Fifteen minutes later, the sushi restaurant’s owner smelled gas and called the landlord, who called the general contractor, Boyce said. Nobody called 911.
