AUSTIN (KXAN) — Jack Muimandi said it felt like the start of an earthquake.
“All of a sudden, I just felt this really loud explosion,” he recalled. “Like, I felt it. The whole apartment rocked.”
The Austin Fire Department described “multiple explosions” and 15-foot high flames sparked by “encampment activity” near Muimadi’s Tech Ridge apartment complex on Dec. 30, according to the incident report — one of hundreds of fires a KXAN investigation found likely connected to homeless encampments in recent months.
In this case, fire crews reported finding “several dozen” gas tanks littering the grassy area between the complex and an adjacent movie theater…