A fire ravaged a building that stored supplies for the vaping industry, triggering multiple explosions.
The blasts claimed one life and left a firefighter injured as they shook suburban Detroit. Authorities reported that gas canisters and debris were propelled high into the air during the incident.
On Monday night, debris fell as far as a mile (1.6 kilometers) away, according to the Clinton Township Police Department's Facebook statement.
Officials advised residents in the vicinity to remain indoors, with the initial explosions occurring around 8:50 p.m. on Monday. Authorities confirmed that the fire was under control by late Monday, but the remnants continued to smolder into Tuesday.
Joleen Vultaggio said she heard Monday night's explosions from 8 miles (13 kilometers) away at her home in Sterling Heights. "It just freaked me out because it wasn't like one boom, it was continuous and it was very intense," she told The Detroit News.
Tuesday morning, Clinton Township Fire Chief Tim Duncan revealed that the burned-down building was a distribution center for the vaping industry, operating under the name Goo. The facility stored over 100,000 vape pens.
Chief Duncan mentioned that delivery of butane canisters had been received in the previous week, and at the onset of the fire, more than half of that supply remained on-site, reported The Associated Press.
One Reported Fatality and Injury
A 19-year-old male died after being struck a quarter of a mile away by one of the canisters. Calling his death "very unfortunate," Duncan said it's believed the man was "just observing" the fire when he was struck.
"The person was essentially about a quarter of a mile down the road here and did suffer injury from one of these flying canisters," Duncan said at a Tuesday news briefing.
A firefighter was also injured when one of the canisters struck the windshield of a fire vehicle.
Select Distributors, synonymous with Goo, operated in the building as well. Duncan believed it supplied gas canisters for local vaping, including vape pens, causing the explosions to disperse debris widely.
Goo had received a township occupancy permit in September 2022 for the 26,700-square-foot (24,80-square-meter) building as a retail location for a "smoke shop/vape store" that would sell paraphernalia for vape products, said Barry Miller, superintendent for Clinton Township's Building Department.
"Until police and fire perform their investigations we really won't know the answers," he said. "They have to find how much product was there, what was there. There's a lot they'll have to look into."
Duncan said investigators would be looking into the legality of what was stored in the building as part of their investigation.
"Our last inspection did not show this amount of material in that building, so we're going to look into that. Some of the reports we're still looking into is obviously the legality of everything that's in there," he said.
The fire chief disclosed that as he was driving to the scene Monday night, he felt his car shake repeatedly by the distant explosions of gas canisters.
"This is what you're seeing strewn about the area, all the canisters, which had nitrous, had butane and they had some other products in there," he said. "At that point, we're basically dodging all these things going through the air."
