1 Killed as Explosion at Michigan Vape Distributor Sends Canisters Flying

A teenager in Michigan was struck and killed by a flying butane canister from an explosive fire at a vaping distributor’s warehouse about a quarter mile away on Monday night, the authorities said.

The 19-year-old man, who was not identified, was among several people injured from chunks of metal that the force of the explosion projected as far as a mile away, Mark Hackel, the county executive in Macomb County in Eastern Michigan, said in an interview.

The fire, which began shortly before 9 p.m. on Monday, filled the night sky with flames and smoke, prompted the police to urge residents to avoid the area and left a trail of charred debris along 15 Mile Road, a highway in Clinton Township, Mich.

“You could see the amount of fire just coursing in the sky, and the explosions were actually shaking the car,” Tim Duncan, the chief of Clinton Township’s fire department, said in a news conference on Tuesday morning.

The person who was killed was watching the blaze when he was struck by the canister, the fire chief said. A firefighter was among those injured when a piece of shrapnel pierced the windshield of his car and nicked his face. He was treated at a hospital and released.

David Storey, a hydraulic technician in Clinton Township, stood about 100 yards away from the blaze with his fiancée and about 15 others with his phone up, recording a percussion of loud booms and burning arcs of fiery canisters, which he said reminded him of fireworks.