A 65-year-old man sustained “serious, but non-life-threatening injuries" when a camper trailer exploded at a campground on Lalandre Lake in West Nipissing this past Saturday.
The OPP say propane leaked into the trailer from the kitchen stove, and just around dinner, the gas ignited and blew the walls and roof off the trailer.
Police received the call at 6:30 p.m., sending OPP, firefighters and EMS on site. Fire Chief Frank Loeffen told our sister site BayToday that some off-duty nurses were camping that weekend on-site and they were able to help the man until more aid arrived.
The man’s name has not been released but he was travelling through the area, hailing from Beloeil, Quebec. He is “in stable condition, as far as I know,” Chief Loeffen added. “They were looking at airlifting him to Sudbury to the trauma unit that night.”
Nobody else was hurt but “a pop-up trailer sustained damage” that was parked on the driver’s side of the trailer.
The chief has decades of experience, and this is the first trailer explosion he’s seen. He’s witnessed propane explosions in confined spaces before, but not within a trailer.
He added that while investigating, “one of the campers, a couple of trailers up, said they could smell propane,” before the blast.
Once the firefighters arrived, the Chief detailed that there wasn’t much fire to put out. “Interestingly enough, there was very little fire involved,” he said. “It basically ignited and then extinguished itself just because of the force of the blast.”
The explosion “burnt up the fuel, but it wasn’t enough to sustain combustion with anything else in the area,” Chief Loeffen said. He also mentioned that “There was a sense of shock, a sense of awe, a sense of wow” amongst his fellow campers when the trailer exploded.
One of those people was David Schell, who posted photos of the event on social media. He noted how he and his family “walked by this motor home minutes before it blew up. We ran to help instantly, and the man was standing in front of the stove with a lighter in his hand.”
David Briggs is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter who works out of BayToday, a publication of Village Media. The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.