A truck carrying thousands of pounds of deodorant exploded in Big Cabin, Oklahoma, lighting up the night with a fiery mushroom cloud.
“It looks like a war zone,” Kevin Oakley, chief of the Big Cabin Fire Department, told KOKI.
Fire officials say the truck’s driver, who was transporting 27,000 pounds of Degree women’s deodorant, pulled into a rest stop early on Friday morning because he was having brake problems. Then he realised his tyres were on fire.
The driver reportedly tried to put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, but soon they had spread to the thousands of aerosol cans in his cargo, igniting them.
What happened next looked like something out of a disaster movie or a Fourth of July celebration – or both.
As the cans exploded one by one, flames from the fresh-smelling tinder grew into a roaring inferno over the truck stop. All the while, individual aerosol cans continued to shoot out of the flames.
“Deodorant aerosol cans were popping off like fireworks,” KOKI reporter Scott Martin tweeted, along with a shocking video of the explosion.
Mr Oakley described the scene as looking “like Roman candles going off”.
The flying Degree cans battered a fire truck as it approached the scene, and damaged a nearby repair shop.
But miraculously, no one was injured.
The Big Cabin Fire Department has reportedly hired a company to clean up the parking lot where the explosion occurred, which on Friday was filled with thousands of charred Degree cans.
Mr Martin joked about the incident on Twitter.
“Can I say I’ve covered it all?” the reporter mused. “It’s not like everyday a semi carrying 27,00lbs of Degree deodorant explodes.”
