By Linda Taaffe

David Hu was counting his blessings from a hospital bed at Stanford Friday where he was recovering from minor injuries following a natural gas explosion that ripped through his Los Altos home leaving nothing but splintered rubble piled 15 feet high on the property.

By all accounts, no one should have survived the blast - especially without serious injuries. Hu and his two children, who were asleep in the house when the explosion occurred Thursday morning, escaped with minor injuries. All three were released from the hospital by the weekend.

“Looking at the extent of the damage - nearly three quarters of the house was destroyed - it’s amazing that three people survived and their injuries are minor,” said Tom Walsh, senior deputy fire marshal for the Santa Clara County Fire Department.

Emergency crews responded to a neighbor’s call at 8:15 a.m. Thursday. A natural gas leak exploded at the Hu family home on Frontero Avenue near Foothill Expressway, just across

from the Loyola Corners shopping district.

PG&E officials were still investigating the cause of the explosion. Spokesman Jeff Smith said investigators should know whether the explosion occurred in or out of the house by the end of the week. The house was a single-story ranch-style home.

Neighbor Susan Hagerty was drinking coffee in her kitchen, which faces the Hu home, when the explosion occurred.

“It felt like a sonic boom,” she said. Everything flew off the kitchen walls. Hagerty ran outside and called 911 as insulation, clothing, children’s toys and bits of plaster from the walls flew into the air, landing on neighbors’ lawns and the tops of trees more than 30 feet above the ground.

There was no fire, she said.

The blast was so powerful, it blew the windows out of the walls and into the yard. None of the panes was cracked or broken.

The roof blew up several feet and landed back on the frame facing a different direction. A stucco wall looked like a blanket draped over the steel entry gate at the front of the driveway.

The portion that did remain standing was warped and bent, with cracks and folds in the walls and door frames with one side protruding forward about four feet more than the opposite site.

Across the expressway, patients at Dr. Rodney Norling’s dentist office on Altos Oaks Drive said the blast shook their chairs. Children playing at McKenzie Park said the trees shook.

The windows of a school bus driving past on Foothill Expressway shattered from the blast, said Terrence Helm, a spokesman for the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office. There were no children in the bus, he added.

Hu’s children, Aaron, 4, and Ashley, 6, had climbed out of the rubble by the time emergency workers arrived.

A neighbor behind the Hu’s home brought Aaron to her house. Ashley was on the rubble, Helm said.

Hu was pinned under a mattress covered with debris, including a portion of the garage roof.

Helm said workers could hear Hu below.

Hu remained conscious throughout the rescue, which took nearly four hours as emergency workers carefully removed layer after layer of debris until they cleared a large enough space to pull Hu out.

Hu suffered some bruises and scratches and minor injuries to his ankle.

Hu’s wife was in China at the time of the explosion.

Hu told reporters that the children would have been sleeping in their own rooms rather than with him if had his wife not been out of town.

The Hu family moved to their Frontero home in January 2003.

Jeff Smith of PG&E said residents should immediately get out of their house at any hint of a gas odor.

“Really, it’s the only thing to do,” he said.

“Just get away from it. Call the fire department and PG&E.”

Smith said home explosions caused by natural gas leaks are not common but have happened twice in recent years, including a home in Cupertino and one in Los Gatos.