Los Angeles South Central still recovering after being leveled by 2021 illegal fireworks explosion

On June 30, 2021, the Los Angeles Police Department’s bomb squad attempted to safely detonated an estimated 5,000 pounds of illegal fireworks it seized in South Central inside an armored truck.

The resulting explosion was felt for blocks, injuring 10 police officers and seven residents, reports NBC4 Los Angeles.

The windows of nearby homes and cars were blown out. A car by the armored truck meant to contain the blast was knocked on its side and nearby homes sustained significant damage.

The 500-pound lid of the explosive container flew into a backyard three blocks away, knocked down a lemon tree and damaged the back wall of the house.

"It felt like a, pretty much a giant bomb, just going off at one time," Thomas Mendez, a nearby resident, told NBC4 at the time. "You could feel like, the wave go off, the explosion, the pressure."

"It felt like... If you had been closer, you would have been injured," he added.

A total of 22 residents, 13 businesses and 37 vehicles were damaged, according to the LAPD’s initial report. Families from houses marked uninhabitable by authorities were provided hotel rooms to stay in as they were repaired.

A year later, residents are still grasping for a return to normalcy. Out of 88 people initially housed at The Level Hotel, 66 are still at the hotel, according to the office of LA city Councilman Curren Price (D), who represents the area.

Jose Becerra, who sued the City of Los Angeles and has five family members injured by the explosion, has not been able to return home as of mid-May.

"We are suffering a lot. It is very difficult to be in a hotel with all of us. There is no family integration and every day feels more like a nightmare. It is painful and frustrating to be living the way we are living," said Becerra in Spanish, about how being split between three different rooms has affected solidarity.

"It is difficult to not have the security of when the house will be ready. Here, at the house,  we can basically be in the same room, taking care of each other and being in contact with each other, but there, at the hotel, we have to have only four people in one room, and we are separated," Becerra's wife, Claudia Silva, added in Spanish.

In an investigation, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives discovered that the man caught with the illegal fireworks actually had 32,000 pounds in his possession, not the 5,000 pounds initially estimated via visual assessment.

This led the LAPD bomb squad to estimate 16.5 pounds of explosive material had been loaded into the armored truck when the actual amount was 42 pounds.

A total of 408 claims have been filed against the city; 87 have been settled, while 280 need more information or a response to continue, according to Price’s office.

A total of $281,316.13 has been paid out to victims so far, Price's office said. The City Council has also provided $10,000 in aid to each of the 26 most severely affected home, along with a $1 million relief fund for cleanup and $5 million to pay for repairs and neighborhood projects.