LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – A muffled sound followed by a house shaking boom startled Kevin Laatz out of bed on April 25 in the Sunrise Manor area, not far from Charleston and Nellis.
“I initially thought it was lightning and I brushed it off as such. But car alarms were going off and there’s no clouds in the sky. It wasn’t raining. So that’s when I knew it wasn’t lighting and it was something else,” said Kevin Laatz.
Laatz recorded the incident on multiple cameras around just after 11 p.m.
The flash and powerful boom were nearly identical to what several people saw and felt in the Lake Las Vegas area in Henderson a few hours after the Super Bowl ended at Allegiant Stadium. Some people say homes shook and windows rattled.
FOX5 saw some video but didn’t get permission from the owner to show it.
FOX5 asked New Mexico Tech near Albuquerque to look at the recent video. The school has decades of experience with explosives and is contracted by the Department of Defense to study the impacts of terrorist explosives.
After analyzing the video, longtime professor Van Romero told FOX5 it appears to be a firework, a good-sized firework you would see in a commercial firework show, 10-12 inches in diameter or bigger.
Romero said the firework was probably about a quarter mile from the home, based on the time you see the flash to when you hear the boom.
He also says that size firework would create a larger air blast that would be loud. He also suspects it wasn’t far off the ground, possibly 200-400 feet.
Romero says something like this can injure people and even be deadly. He says a blast near the ground can turn rocks into projectiles, like bullets being fired, said Romero.
Laatz was concerned to hear that with so many families with children in the neighborhood.
“There’s so many things that can go wrong,” said Laatz.
Romero says people do experiment and make their own fireworks, but there’s no way to tell if that’s what happened in the latest incident.
The Clark County Fire Department says people can report illegal fireworks by calling 311.
Copyright 2024 KVVU. All rights reserved.