Roughly $583,000 has been collected to assist residents and families affected by a March 3 explosion and fire in the Silver Spring area, and the fund is expected to climb past $600,000, officials said.
Chris Gillis, the director of policy and neighborhood development of Montgomery Housing Partnership, said in an interview that a large donation expected from Washington Gas and other sources should increase the fund to more $600,000 in roughly a week. Montgomery Housing Partnership is overseeing a fund to help affected residents.
Gillis said that as of Thursday, about $463,000 of the money has been distributed to affected residents.
In an email last week, Charlotte Garvey, a communications consultant for Montgomery Housing Partnership, wrote: “All displaced residents received over $6,000 in cash assistance by the fifth day after the event from a combination of sources, including 3 months market-rate rent, their security deposit, $1,500 from the MHP-managed relief fund, funds from the Red Cross, and other organizations.”
Raymond Crowel, director of the county’s Department of Health and Human Services, said in a news briefing in early March that 41 apartment units in the complex were affected by the explosion, displacing 124 adults and 36 children.
After an investigation, officials determined that the explosion and fire at the 2405 building at the Friendly Garden Apartments complex on Lyttonsville Road was caused by a maintenance worker who cut a gas pipe an inch-and-a-half in diameter. The maintenance worker thought he was cutting a waste drain pipe to remove a clog from a first-floor apartment, officials said.
Fourteen people were initially hospitalized because of the incident. That eventually dropped to one person hospitalized because of the incident and another hospitalized for an unrelated reason.
Scott Goldstein, the county’s fire chief, said in an interview on Thursday that he didn’t have any update on the two people who were hospitalized.
Gillis said the Montgomery County government has been organizing disaster recovery meetings once or twice a week. A smaller committee — four to six people, including him — is overseeing the Montgomery Housing Partnership fund.
He said he doesn’t know how long the fund will be kept open, but donations from individuals, banks and organizations have helped. One is Tzu Chi, an international Buddhist charity based in Taiwan that has an office in North Potomac.
The partnership likes to hold on to 10% to 20% of the fund as a reserve as a best practice, to help pay for medical expenses for those who were injured and for other costs to residents, Gillis said.
Ilana Branda, the county’s deputy chief of services to prevent and end homelessness, said in an interview that 15 people in five households, spread out between the 2401, 2405 and 2411 buildings at the Friendly Garden complex, are still awaiting new housing.
The 2401 and 2411 buildings will need repairs before they are safe to inhabit, Branda said.
The rest of the affected households have moved into new homes, have signed leases, are waiting to sign leases or have applied to other apartment complexes or places to live, mostly within the Capital Beltway, she added.
The owner of the property, according to county records, is Friends Non-Profit Housing Inc., a nonprofit. The entity looks to offer low-income housing opportunities, according to tax records.
It shares an office in Columbia with ResidentialONE, a property management company that oversees the Friendly Garden Apartments complex and tens of thousands of other units across the Washington, D.C., region.
Branda said one of the immediate challenges for residents was finding affordable housing for displaced residents. People in some units had lived in Friendly Gardens for 20 or 30 years, she said.
Friends Non-Profit Housing offered units much lower than the market rate, and even lower than the federal and state standards for area median income, Branda said. That’s rare for the county, she said.
Tony Ross, the president of ResidentialONE, could not be reached for comment by phone or email on Thursday.
Richard Mounts, the president of Friends Non-Profit Housing Inc., could not be reached for comment at a phone number for the address listed in the tax filings.
Branda said there were similarities between the Friendly Garden Apartments fire and explosion and the Flower Branch Apartments explosion in 2016, when she was working with Montgomery Housing Partnership to manage that emergency fund.
A difference, however, was that the households at Flower Branch Apartments were typically bigger, meaning officials had to find apartments with at least three bedrooms for displaced residents.
Apartment units were not as “financially interconnected” at Flower Branch, meaning there were more working adults who were not related living together, Branda said.
Steve Bohnel can be reached at steve.bohnel@moco360.media
