I don't think it was "out of nowhere" considering there's an alarm going off, and the fire department is out there. Looks like a gas leak that probably hit a pilot light.
Was this the one in texas, or in plum PA? Or a different one. As the gas infrastructure ages we are getting more and more of this. I mean, it's only a couple over the past few years vs the 100s of thousands of houses with gas lines, so it's still relatively rare.
I cannot speak for this situation but I can offer some insight into the systems responsible. One of my firm's specializations is data integrity and optimization, and one of our clients is a utilities company. The system we managebis supposed to detect, report, and shutdown any gas meter with anomalous behavior, then dispatch a crew to investigate. The SLA (maximum allowed time before penalties are incurred) from anomaly to shutdown is two minutes. We have it down to under thirty seconds.
If this was an accidental gas leak severe enough to prompt for a crew dispatch, then the meter should have been shut down long before there was enough lost gas to blow up a house.
PS: Propane tank fueled furnace in the basement is bad, mmmmkay.
Poorly planned and performed utility maintenance caused a gas leak and thus explosion. That’s usually the backstory behind gas leak explosions these days.
A natural gas service line was damaged during work, and just thirty minutes later the home exploded on Tuesday, Dec. 13, an investigation by the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission (PUC) revealed.