A plane crashed into a neighborhood in Arvada. Authorities from the Arvada Fire Protection District say that the plane was on fire when it crashed. The Arvada Police Department (APD) and other agencies were called to put out the fire and help the four people who were hurt. The incident happened at about 9:30 a.m. local time on Friday, June 7.
In a post on X (which used to be Twitter), Arvada Police said that the victims are two adults and two children.
FOX 31 in Denver reported that many people in the neighborhood rushed to help after the crash and pulled the victims out of the fire.
“We saw the explosion and the glow from the outside and thought, ‘Well, wait a second,'” Randy Hamrick, a resident of the area, told the news source. He and his wife thought their house was falling down at first.
“It felt like it was going to fall in.” “I mean, it was that violent,” Hamrick said.
Another neighbor who saw the crash, Evan Sherlock, told NBC station 9 News that neighbors rushed out with garden hoses to put out the fire, and construction workers nearby also rushed over to help.
Sherlock remembered, “I saw an airplane whose wings were tipped side to side.” He also said that the plane looked like it was leaking fuel. “Next thing I know, you see a giant plume of smoke, and I was there within a minute.”
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which looks into aviation accidents, told PEOPLE that the pilot of the 1969 Beechcraft 35 took off from Centennial Airport, which is south of Denver, and seemed to be on his way to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, which is about 30 miles away.
While the flight was going on, the pilot started calling local air traffic control to let them know that the plane’s engines were having trouble. The pilot “did not land at the airport and instead attempted a forced landing onto a road” about 15 minutes after takeoff, the NTSB said. We do not know why.
The NTSB is now looking into what happened, and the plane will be taken to one of their facilities to be looked at, the agency said.
Alex Lemishko, a senior accident inspector for the NTSB, told the Associated Press that no one was home when the plane crashed in the yard.
Lemishko also said it was likely that the pilot was trying to land on a road or close train tracks, which are both safe places to land in an emergency. The Beechcraft 35 may have hit a tree, though, which is what made it skid down the road and into the yard.
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