‘Pest bombs’ explode Brisbane restaurant
Brisbane restaurant owners have blown out their front door and rear wall because they used too many pest control bombs, police say.
Emergency services were called to the Glamorous Wok at Sunnybank just after 10pm and arrived to a destroyed back door and front wall that had buckled.
The owners had lodged 24 cans of pest repellent around the store.
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Acacia Ridge Fire and Emergency Services station officer Michael Yates said they were originally told the owners had laid “some 12 pest bombs inside the premises”.
“I sent a couple fire-fighters in with atmospheric test equipment and a thermal imaging camera to make sure there was no residue vapours; there wasn’t any signs of fire. Police then did a secondary sweep of the building and found 24 pest bombs,” Mr Yates said.
Pest bombs blow out Glamorous Wok in Sunnybank @7NewsQueensland pic.twitter.com/F2N8MMkAlG
— Marlina Whop (@MarlinaWhop) July 31, 2015
“There is structural damage to the restaurant … the front door was buckled out and the rear door was blown out.”
According to Mr Yates, pest bomb explosions are not very common.
“This (kind of explosion) usually happens with a gas leak. I haven’t in my 20-year career seen a pest bomb explosion,” Mr Yates said.
“What happens with these, they have hydrocarbon propellant within the aerosol, and they go up into the air and kill the bugs but they’re extremely flammable and may present an explosion hazard.
Obviously if you’re going to set off 24 that’s a large volume of propellant so it obviously found an ignition source and caused an vapour explosion which expands out with a sudden rush, which is why the front of the restaurant buckled out.”
– with ABC