By: Las Vegas Now Staff
An explosion and fire at the Las Vegas boat harbor caused more than $1 million in damage early Thursday morning. Investigators are now trying to figure out what caused the explosion.
It happened about 6:30 a.m. No one was injured, but it only took a matter of minutes for fire to destroy three boats and parts of the marina.
On the other side of the caution tape, firefighters chop the dock to pieces to dig out pockets of heat.
The alarms rang out for hours as firefighters spent the morning fighting the flames and hauling out a charred hull to the shore. Eyewitnesses say it all went wrong very fast.
Alex Fletcher was there. “It was a pretty loud bang, and the engine compartment of the boat lifted up.”
While Fletcher didn't want to go on camera, he described what he saw. “All the windows busted out. It was something I had never seen before in person and never thought I would see.”
Marina owner Gary Gripentog tried to help fight the fire. “It is not like a fighting a fire where you can get all the way around it, and all of these boats have 200 gallons of fuel on them.”
But in just three minutes, three boats were gone.
“Fiberglass burns real hot and real black, lots of smoke and flames poking through it,” said Gripentog.
“It was going to be called Pocket Change,” said another victim, Deidre Taylor. She had a million dollar insurance policy on her boat.
Where's her boat? ”Apparently at the bottom of the lake at this time,” she said.
Thursday morning, she sorts through what's left of her memories in the water.
“Probably the first, probably one of the best times we had a lot of family – a lot of friends with us and went out on the lake for the first time and just had a really good time with all of the friends and family,” laughed Taylor.
Judy Nurse is one of her friends. “It's just hard to believe that it is here today and gone tomorrow. There is no evidence that it was there.”
It's just a memory reclaimed by the water.
The Las Vegas Boat Harbor was just moved to this location, and the new owners have only been here for less than a month. They are insured, but it's a real tough break for them.
Now that the smoke has cleared off the water, fire investigators are trying to figure out what happened. Eyewitness News did find out the owner of the first boat that exploded lives out of state.
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