July 12, 2019, 11:19 AM PDT / Updated July 12, 2019, 11:56 AM PDT By Minyvonne Burke
Surveillance video caught the moment a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in North Carolina exploded, reducing it to rubble.
The explosion happened around 12:30 a.m. Thursday in Eden, which is about 35 miles north of Greensboro. Eden police said the fast-food restaurant closed between 10:15 and 10:30 p.m. and nobody was inside at the time it was destroyed.
There have been no reports of injuries, authorities said.
Video from Eden Drug, a pharmacy next door to the KFC, showed the building suddenly ripped apart by a large blast as debris flew through the air. A photo the Eden Police Department posted on Facebook showed the store reduced to just a partial building frame.
A Kentucky Fried Chicken in Eden, North Carolina, was reduced to rubble after it exploded early Thursday morning.Eden Police Department “We are devastated by this incident, but most importantly we are grateful that all of our restaurant team members are safe and no one was injured," a KFC spokesperson said in a statement.
Employees who are affected will have their choice to work at six area KFC restaurants “to minimize disruption to their work schedules and pay” while the Eden location is rebuilt, the spokesperson said.
Eden Mayor Neville Hall told NBC affiliate WXII in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, that he was several miles away and still felt the blast. He said residents and the store's employees are lucky.
"It's hard to see that and think you can be lucky about anything," he said, noting that if the blast had occurred hours earlier, the restaurant would have been "packed with people."
Authorities are still trying to determine the cause of the explosion. NBC affiliate WCNC in Charlotte, North Carolina, reported that energy and natural gas crews arrived at the KFC location shortly after the explosion.
I don't remember anything about this commercial. I DO remember TV ads with the Colonel in them. He was the company, in a way, and without his jovial presence the product would have landed with a thud. But this ad wasn't his sort of thing, it wasn't. It's kind of surreal, or at least weird and menacing. They're trying to torture the good Colonel into giving away his Secret Recipe of Eleven Herbs and Spices (two of which are salt and pepper). It seems to me KFC (as it's called now, no doubt to get rid of that dreaded word "fried", even though the recipe is pretty much the same) used to taste pretty good, and it seems to me that now, what with all the improvements over the years, it tastes pretty dreadful. It isn't just the taste but the rubbery texture, the grease spurting every time you bite into it. The relative tastelessness. No doubt in the old days, they used real chickens, the kind that cluck and scratch and run around in a pen. Now they use rubbery chicken machines, clones or hybrids crossed with vulcanized rubber, their breasts so overinflated they fall over and can't walk any more.
Chickens which don't even know what the light of day is. Another thing. It's hard to even GET any KFC now when you go to the takeout counter. Actual chicken is relegated to one item on the menu at the very bottom. Everything else is wraps and quesadillas and nuggets and whatever-else (who looks? I want CHICKEN). If you do order chicken, and they always look at you strangely if you do, you wait a very long time, and then all you get is (as they call it) "brown meat". You can't get white meat unless you pay extra, and sometimes it isn't available at all. I wish I knew what happened to it. There have been a number of people "playing" Col. Sanders in ads recently, and they're all idiots. The design on the "bucket" (read: sign, as they don't do buckets any more) is now more jolly-looking, though Col. Sanders never looked like that. He was a crabby old man, and people liked him that way. He had a unique method of quality control, and it was most innovative, not to mention very effective. He travelled around the country, randomly dropping in to Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and ordering a bucket of chicken, which he would go through methodically piece by piece and analyze for this quality or that. Then he would eat it. His favorite was the top of the wing, and I have to agree with him there.
