Gas stations are dangerous!

[Pilot_51]

I was taking advantage of the Overwatch free weekend when my brother barged into Mumble (voice chat), after he said he was going to bed, to tell me it sounded like a jet outside and the sky was lit up. We got into Hangouts so he could show me and a friend what the sky looked like, and we could hear it through his mic as well. I immediately thought it was a gas line fire since it looked and sounded exactly like other videos I've seen of gas line fires. We spent about an hour looking for information as it came in. The first tweet we found said it was the Meijer gas station, which is about 75 feet from the new Auburn Hills supercharger, and we believed it for about 30 minutes even though the fire looked way too big to be an ordinary gas station fire or even a tanker truck. It took about an hour for the news to get on it with more solid information.

Turns out a Consumer's Energy natural gas main exploded across the street from the gas station.

Here are a couple news articles with the details:
Massive gas line fire burns in Orion Township near border of Auburn Hills
Massive explosion, fire on Brown Road in Orion Twp

Of course, there were also a bunch of tweets and a couple Facebook videos we found while trying to piece together what was going on. Here's a Facebook Live video with the supercharger shown safe near the end: Katrina Akers Sutton

Here's a screenshot of what it looked like (with bad exposure) from my brother's window, about 4 miles away.

 

[Takumi]

 

[swaltner]

Wow! That looked like a BLEVE! This is why you should leave evacuate any situation where there is a fire near some kind of pressure vessel. It doesn’t have to be flammable liquid in the container to be a problem.

Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion - Wikipedia