CLINTON TOWNSHIP, Mich. – The morning after a massive fire engulfed a building in Clinton Township, the fire chief explained what caused the explosions that could be heard throughout Macomb County.
Clinton Township fire Chief Tim Duncan said the department began receiving reports about the explosions before 9 p.m. Monday, March 4, 2024. Some people thought they were hearing gunshots, but that wasn’t the case.
Duncan said the fire began at a building that contains two companies that are “one and the same”: Goo and Select Distributors. They are part of the vaping industry.
“They have the company called ‘Goo,’ and then they’re also a distributor to the industry,” Duncan said. “There was some thought that this was a marijuana dispensary. Obviously, Clinton Township doesn’t allow that. So what ends up being is that they actually supply the industry in the region with these gasses. The vape pens -- having over 100,000 vape pens in there -- so that’s why there was this amount of product in that building.
“You have ‘Goo,’ and they have certain products that they probably sell out of there, and then you have the Select Distributors side, which, I believe, is the one that’s supplying the gasses to the local area for what they do with their dispensaries, or they’re selling them the pens or the gasses needed to handle this industry.”
Officials believe some of those gasses were responsible for Monday night’s explosions.
“They had literally received a truckload of butane within the past week, and they still had over half of that left,” Duncan said. “So this is what you’re seeing strewn throughout the area -- all the canisters, which you had nitrous, you had butane, and then they had some other products in there.
“The fire typically would have started. You get that product heating up. All of a sudden, it’s going to blow up. You’ve got that vessel that’s getting more pressurized. You’ll see some of these products where the actual top is blown off and the canister went up like a missile, and then you have other ones that blew up in place and then came over. So you’re seeing a variety of full canisters and then ones that are totally torn apart and basically shrapnel going through the air.”
The last inspection at the building was about a year ago, and there weren’t this many materials, Duncan said.
“We’re still looking into the legality of everything that’s in there,” Duncan said. “I think, a lot of times, the industry’s just not -- there’s not as much oversight as we probably should have with some of these situations.”
Police don’t believe propane was a major factor. They think the primary chemicals that caught fire were butane, nitrous, and lighter fluid.
“We believe if there was propane, it was minimal,” Duncan said. “We don’t think that that was a major issue in there. Obviously, there is equipment that would have propane tanks, along that line. So we can’t rule out that there was some amount of propane, but we think that was on the minimal side.”
Owners of the company estimated there were 100,000 vape pens inside the building.