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Three people were injured in a propane explosion in the RM of Taché on Thursday.
The fire department in the rural municipality about 40 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg received calls of an explosion at a propane distribution centre around 3:30 Thursday afternoon.
Deputy Chief Jason Kroeker said Friday crews arrived to find a structure containing roughly 100 propane tanks on fire, with two to three bulk tanks and about 250 more tanks outside the building.
Three people were in the structure at the time of the explosion, he said.
STARS air ambulance took one patient to Health Sciences Centre while another was transported to the same hospital by ambulance. A third person was treated on scene and released.
RCMP said in a statement on Friday the injuries were non-life-threatening.
John Paille, who owns Prairie Propane, told CBC News two of his employees were treated for minor burns and released.
He called the situation a “glorified garage fire” as the blaze was contained to a 24×32-foot garage.
However, Kroeker says the propane tanks posed a high risk of BLEVE, or boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion, a situation in which gas is unable to vent faster than it expands.
Jason Kroeker, deputy chief with RM of Tache Fire Department, said the large number of propane tanks on site posed a high risk to first responders. (Submitted by Jason Kroeker)
“You can have the tank actually explode and send out quite a debris field in all directions,” Kroeker told CBC News in a telephone interview on Friday. “Large explosions would be our primary concern involving propane tanks.”
Kroeker said the “complex and fast moving incident” meant additional firefighters were needed, so crews from Ste. Anne and Giroux were on the scene as well..
“This type of incident involving this amount of propane and number of bottle involved there would be a very exceptional incident type for us,” Kroeker said.
“It’s fairly common in working-structure fires or even vehicle fires that you might have a number of standard propane bottles, but not in the thousands of propane bottles on kind of a condensed site.”
The fire was under control within an hour, Kroeker said. Crews remained on scene for about six hours.
Kroeker said he was unable to comment on the cause of the explosion as Steinbach RCMP, Workplace Health and Safety and the Office of the Fire Commissioner continue to investigate.