GEORGE RICHERT
WIVB
Reprinted with Permission

BUFFALO, N.Y. (WIVB) - Thursday morning, a homemade explosive went off in a downtown building


All is clear now, but whoever did this could be in big trouble.

Someone had the nerve to bring a homemade explosive, M80-type device, inside the Board of Elections building, and set it off on the same floor is Erie County Sheriff's Professional Standards Unit.

It happened before 10 a.m. Thursday, about 100 Board of Elections workers and a dozen Erie County Sheriff's Office workers evacuated the building for about an hour.

Delaware Avenue and West Eagle Street were both closed to traffic.

What sounded like an explosion between the fourth and fifth floors of the building left a purplish smoke in the fourth floor.

"We just heard a little boom I guess it was, or a noise, we thought it might have been the garage door, we didn't think of anything until we heard the fire alarm go off, " said Erie County Elections Commissioner Dennis Ward.

Deputy Anthony Giglio of the Erie County Sheriff's Office said, "We were grabbing the people from the fourth floor. We were using the stairwells to evacuate the building. When we opened the stairwell there was a white, purplish type of smoke in the stairwell. It was not over powering by any stretch of the imagination, but it was prevalent."

Buffalo Fire Department Battalion Chief said John Mogavero, "Typically, unless you have a boiler, nothing really explodes like that. If you have a natural gas explosion, typically it doesn't explode and shake a building like that."

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