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LOS ANGELES — Three sheriff’s deputies were killed in an explosion Friday morning at a law enforcement training center in Los Angeles, local and federal officials said.

The deaths were the largest loss of life for the county sheriff’s department from a single episode since 1857, authorities said.

It was not immediately clear what caused the blast, which occurred at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Biscailuz Training Academy center in East Los Angeles. But a state official familiar with the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation, called the explosion a tragic accident that appeared to have stemmed from the handling of on-site explosives.

There was no threat to the area, and the explosion was an isolated episode, said Sheriff Robert Luna of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

He added that the explosion at the training center occurred around 7:30 a.m. Pacific time. No one else was injured by the blast, he said.

The deputies, who have not been identified, were a part of the department’s arson-explosives unit and had been with the department between 19 and 33 years, Luna said.

Members of that bomb squad unit regularly handle dangerous situations or items, with an average of about 1,110 calls per year, he said.

“They are fantastic experts,” Luna said, “and unfortunately, I lost three of them today.”

The three deputies had responded Thursday to a call in Santa Monica to assist police there about explosive devices that were found, according to Nicole Nishida, a spokesperson for the Sheriff’s Department.

The Sheriff’s Department said it was not clear if those devices were the ones responsible for Friday’s explosion. But homicide investigators were seeking a search warrant for the Santa Monica location and had evacuated residents there, Nishida said.

A Los Angeles County official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the investigation said the three deputies were alone when the explosion occurred, leaving few witnesses to shed light on the cause.

A bomb squad with the Los Angeles Police Department rendered the scene safe by late Friday morning, Luna said, allowing investigators to begin to gain access to the site.

“We have to go back, investigate what happened from the very beginning, and we’ll get there,” he said.

Investigators with the FBI, as well as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and detectives with the county sheriff’s department were among those working at the site.

Luna called the site of the explosion an “active crime scene” and said homicide investigators were there.

A formal law enforcement procession to escort the bodies and surviving relatives to the county medical examiner’s office occurred late Friday afternoon. “This is a heartbreaking day for our county family,” Kathryn Barger, chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, said in a statement, adding that flags at all county facilities would be lowered to half-staff.

The training facility, named for Eugene Biscailuz, a long-serving sheriff who helped organize the California Highway Patrol and was its first superintendent, lies east of downtown Los Angeles. The site hosts, among other county offices, the sheriff’s Special Enforcement Bureau, a specialized unit that provides a range of tactical, rescue and counterterrorism support services throughout the county, including an explosives detail.

Several people who live near the training center said in interviews that they did not hear an explosion. Mandie Rios, who lives a couple of blocks from the center, was still groggy with sleep Friday morning when she heard what sounded to her like a moving truck’s door being slammed shut. A little later, she turned on the television and heard the news of the blast.

Friday’s explosion comes more than two years after a deadly episode at a training facility for the sheriff’s department. In November 2022, 25 recruits at an academy near the city of Whittier were injured while on a run after a driver going the wrong way ran into them. One of the recruits later died from his injuries, and the driver was charged with vehicular manslaughter and reckless driving.

The handling of explosives by police officers and sheriff’s deputies in Los Angeles has led to problems in the past.

In June 2021, 17 people were injured when part of a cache of illegal fireworks blew up in South Los Angeles in what was meant to be a controlled detonation by bomb squad technicians. Those technicians worked for the Los Angeles Police Department, not the county sheriff’s department. Ten of the injured were law enforcement officers.

The explosion also caused extensive damage to more than 20 homes and over a dozen businesses. The Los Angeles Police Department later said personnel had incorrectly estimated the weight of the fireworks, and the city last year agreed to pay more than $21 million to settle claims by residents.

This article originally appeared in .

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