At 4:10 a.m. this morning, my telephone rang...Kim was on the line...Mom, she said, is it thundering at home, is it a weird kind of thunder? No, I replied, but if it is thundering there it will probably head our way because we have had thunderstorms every day for the last couple of weeks. Kim said she couldn't see any lightning but she said at 10 to 4 in the morning, her cat woke her up when all of sudden there was a loud boom and her apartment building shook and the windows rattled. She got up and the noise didn't stop, it was continuous boom, boom, boom. Ten minutes into the conversation we concluded that it wasn't thunder because there was still no lightning and there was no let up in the booms. I suggested she call the police admin number rather then 911 which she did but kept getting a busy. She called me back 15 minutes later and by that time I was awake enough to turn on the radio and found out that a large propane storage plant was on fire and blowing up a couple of miles to the north and west of her.
Kim and her sister live in Toronto which is about 43 miles west of me. Many thoughts ran through my mind, the first was to get dressed, drive in to their place and bring them back home along with their cats. By that time, however, the police had closed highway 401 in both directions and the only alternative would be to take city back streets to get to where they live. However, everyone was being warned to stay away from the area. I continued to monitor the radio and heard that an evacuation order was being released and thankfully the perimeters of that order ended about a mile from where Kim and her sister live.
At 5 a.m. I put the tv on to a 24 hour news channel and saw pictures of the fire and explosions...the first explosion at 3:50 a.m. looked like an atomic explosion, a huge mushroom shaped fire-red cloud..no wonder Kim and her sister felt their building shake..this propane storage facility is located in a residential area (the city of Toronto needs to have some answers ready), many residents were seen running down the street in their housecoats, some shoeless, some carrying their pets in their arms, houses with doors and windows blown out, just utter chaos. Residents were told if they didn't have a vehicle, then they had to walk, eastwards away from their homes and the scene of the fire. The first explosion Kim heard was at 10 to 4 in the morning, they were continuous, almost every minute until about 20 to 5 in the morning and then sporadic until about 6 a.m. Security alarms in buildings and on parked vehicles, some even in underground parking lots were activated...along with the sounds of the explosions, no wonder people thought a terroist attack had occurred.
As I write this the highway is still closed...it is difficult to get into or out of Toronto but at least the fire scene is a little bit more stablized. The concern is that there are 2 large railroad cars of propane on fire however, so far, the fire department has managed to cool the tanks off, keeping them from exploding. Unfortunately at the time of the explosions, there were workers at the plant. The latest news coverage says all but one are accounted for but the miracle is, so far there have been no fatalities.
Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Canada is very lax when it comes to where these propane fuel storage plants can be located. It is so unfortunate that it takes an accident like this to make our govenment wake up or at least I hope it will but I see an interesting time ahead this week with the City of Toronto trying to answer how this storage facility was allowed to locate in a built-up residential area 5 years ago.
