Nutter: Cigarette Link to Explosion is “Pure Speculation”
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said reports that Monday’s house explosion in South Philly may have been caused when a handyman lit a cigarette, were “pure speculation at this point.”
“There is a lot of speculation about what was happening in the house Monday morning. I’m not able to address rumors and speculation,” Nutter said in an afternoon news conference.
Of course, that speculation was fed by a seemingly official source, Councilman Mark Squilla, who visited the explosion site on Tuesday and suggested the cigarette connection. “He supposedly went in the building, tried to do it, couldn’t get it to work, went out, came back in. Sometime during that process he lit a cigarette and when that happened the house exploded,” Squilla said of a contractor on the house, which was undergoing rehab.
Eight people were injured in explosion.
Read a full report from the Mayor’s news conference on Property.
