No major injuries after explosion at Halifax industrial park, fire service says
By The Canadian Press
HALIFAX – There were no major injuries after a silo roof explosion in the Burnside industrial park on Monday, the Halifax fire department says.
It said on Twitter the first calls reporting a loud explosion to 911 were made by several witnesses around 3:30 p.m.
“Despite many people initially thinking there was a fire because they saw what appeared to be smoke, it was in fact concrete dust from the silo,” said the department. “No fire.”
The department also said pieces of the roof could be seen 1,000 feet away, while “The top of the silo landed on the roof of a car!”
Several tweets posted by people in the area reported smoke and dust in the air earlier Monday and said that fire units and the police were seen responding to the site of Quality Concrete in Burnside.
“We just heard a huge explosion which shook our building in Burnside. Hope everyone is ok,” tweeted Nova Scotia Easter Seals CEO Joanne Bernard.
Spokeswoman Tracey Tulloch of Quality Concrete’s owner, Stevens Group, confirmed that there had been an incident at the plant, but she declined to give details because of an ongoing investigation by the provincial Labour Department.
“A fly ash storage silo is what we are looking at,” said Tulloch. “We don’t know specifically what transpired.”
However, Tulloch did confirm that no injuries were reported.
In a tweet, the fire service said it had deployed a drone in the area to assess damage at the MacDonald Avenue site.
