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Downsview Sunrise Propane Explosion

casaguy

casaguy

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Just walked in, rather tipsy from a fun night. I thought I was hearing an incrediblly loud thunder cloud but realized that my entire apartment south of Bloor Street was shaking. (Plus the sky is clear.)

We still don't know what exactly happened but no word of a lie I saw a HUGE bright mushroom cloud and constant explosions thereafter. I thought it was an atomic bomb of some sort. We are hearing now it may be an Esso storage site. I'm sure an update will be forthcoming...

Here's some pics from Bloor Street taken around 3:50am...

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yep, I also felt it down here at Queen St. Im listening to a live news feed right now on the net at 680news.com All sorts of sh*t is going down up at (what they suspect is) the refinery.

Thanks for posting those pics.
 
When I first saw the flames and smoke I thought one or even two planes as large as 747s crashed. At first it appeared as though the site of the explosions was the airfield at Yorkdale.
 
People calling in are now saying it may be the Propane depot. Im surprised there's no mention of this yet at TheStar or CP24. They're slow on the ball. I guess radio is still ahead of the net when it comes to breaking news.
 
Interesting to note, as soon as I saw the above images I reached for my home phone to call 911. There was no dial tone. Only a fast busy signal. I guess thousands of people were calling 911 at the same time.
 
I;m at Allen and Eglinton and it felt like the building I am in was collapsing. I had to pick up my buddy who is thankfully ok at Keele and Wilson in a building just north on keele. Messed up and couldn't believe I was seeing such a large explosion reflecting off a building at bathurst and Lawrence.
 
Wow. What an amazing image!

Looks like things settled down, though reports are that the area bounded by Wilson on south, the CN Newmarket Sub on west side, Ancaster on east side, and Sheppard on the north, was evacuated. Perhaps about 200 homes and several businesses.

Yeah, though it wasn't very good and was very repetitve, 680 AM (on the plain old radio) did the story the best - CP24 is a shadow of its former self. CTV Newsnet was the first TV station to pick it up.

This is a good video, it's really good starting around 1:45:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oV5udSWJcZo
 
The picture in the Star now pinpoints the location. Using the oh-so-very-useful MS Live Maps, there is a small propane depot between Teskey Cement and Bombardier, Sunrise Petroleum, it looks like. (Making the photo above even more ironic)

Proving that MS' product, at least for areas where they have coverage, is much more useful than Google's - the ariel/bird's eye images are from 2007!
 
Yeah, what is up with CP24 these days? The first big blast woke up both myself and my girlfriend and the second one a few minutes later got me to check out what the hell was going on. I could see the whole thing going on from my window.
I turned to CP24 and they had their regular law programming go on, followed by a 1-hour segment on Coldplay and fashion before any mention of the whole incident occurred. My girlfriend had a 6:30am flight this morning, and it would have been nice to know what happened. My first thought was that an airplane crashed at Pearson.

That first blast was a doozy, though. It shook our apartment building, and we're about 10km away from ground zero.
 
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