CALEB NICKERSON
CLARENDON June 14, 2019
Fire crews responded to a call at the local transfer station on Friday morning, after a ruptured propane tank exploded and set some compacted garbage alight. Thankfully no one was injured and damage to the site was minimal.
Shawville Clarendon Fire Chief Lee Laframboise said that he got the call to the facility, operated by Tom Orr Cartage on the Seventh Line in Clarendon, just before 9 a.m. He said that workers were loading up trucks when a loader struck the cylinder.
“The big shovel scooped in … and there was a propane tank in the garbage, like a barbeque tank, and it blew up,” he said.
Laframboise said that three SCFD trucks and 13 firefighters responded, along with a truck and four personnel from the Campbell’s Bay Litchfield Department. The two departments have a mutual aid agreement for structural fires during the week.
“It took us three or four hours because we used the shovel and the skid steer to pull some garbage out of the transfer station, so that took a while,” he said. “It was just to make sure [the fire] wasn’t coming back.”
Tom Orr Cartage owner Jenner Garcia said that propane tanks are definitely not allowed at the transfer site, and blamed lax screening at other municipal sites for allowing such hazardous material into their domestic waste.
“They don’t care, they put in anything they want. That’s not right,” he said. “We need the municipalities to stop their citizens from putting everything in the garbage, it has to be only domestic … We cannot go in and check what is in every single load. It’s impossible, we can’t do that.”
