Four explosions rocked the 3500 Block of Coast Meridian Road Saturday morning, leaving one man with burns on his hands and sending a woman to hospital with burns on both her hands and face.
At 2:20 a.m., Rita Fairbank said she woke up about 10 houses down from the explosions.
“I woke to the house shaking,” said Fairbank. “We had a picture rattling against the wall. My first thought: it was an earthquake.”
Neighbours adjacent to the explosions woke up in a daze as the first blast tore through a backyard shed next door.
“I looked out the window. These trees are 20 feet high,” said one neighbour who did not want to be identified. “I’m looking out my window and this explosion, a huge fireball comes over the trees.”
When the neighbour came outside to see what was happening, he said he saw a man trying to haul things out of a burning shed.
“They were screaming and hollering for help, ‘Help, help, help!’ he told The Tri-City News. “It was crazy.”
That’s when he grabbed a garden house.
“My other neighbour was up in his tree house spraying down on the fire, while I was spraying from my yard.”
Port Coquitlam firefighters arrived a few minutes later and quickly set about putting out the burning garden shed.
An ambulance arrived and quickly whisked the injured woman off to Royal Columbian Hospital, said Port Coquitlam fire chief Nick Delmonico.
“It appeared that the shed had been used for some kind of drug reduction — it was full of chemicals and burners and bunch of stuff,” he said.
When the firefighters went to investigate the cause of the fire, they found several containers of chemicals and burners.
“We think — I know it's never good to think — but [the injured woman] appeared to be having a cigarette by the shed and that may have caused the explosion with the off-gassing of some of the chemicals,” said Delmonico.
When The Tri-City News arrived later Saturday morning, Coquitlam RCMP had sealed off the property with yellow crime-scene tape and said they were waiting for a warrant to search the house.
The 10-by-12 soundproofed garden shed had been reduced to ashes and neighbours pointed out drums of fertilizer, machinery and a power generator. The kind of glass piping you’d expect to find in a chemistry lab was strewn among the burnt debris. A leak in a blackened garden hose spurted a stream of water a few inches into the air before falling back into the charred backyard wreckage.
“It’s a quiet neighbourhood. It’s pretty unusual for this to happen,” said the neighbour.
