The Ontario Fire Marshal and police are working to determine what caused an explosion inside a Forest Hill-area marijuana dispensary on Friday that was powerful enough to shatter windows and rip fingers from a man’s hand.
The incident occurred at Tweeder Medicinal, near the intersection of Eglinton Avenue and Avenue Road, just after 7:30 p.m. on Friday, police said.
Video footage of the scene from a security camera obtained by CTV Toronto shows people walking along Eglinton casually before the explosion.
The blast sent glass flying onto the sidewalk, whizzing near passersby.
"There was a man out here who had clearly been in this explosion and he was missing most of the fingers on one of his hands," area resident Geoffrey McVey told CTV Toronto. “He seemed very calm about the whole thing.”
Witnesses told officers the explosion blew out the windows of the dispensary while one person remained inside.
"Glass was projected out onto the street and the sidewalk along with the couch that you see out on the sidewalk now," Jeff Tebby from the office of the fire marshal said on Saturday.
About 37 seconds into the surveillance video, a man can be seen exiting the building where the explosion happened.
The blast came from the basement, fire officials confirmed.
Officers arriving on scene located one man who suffered from burns and other non-life-threatening injuries. He was taken to hospital. Police later said another man suffered from injuries and had wrapped a towel around his hands. But he left the building through the back, they said.
The Ontario Fire Marshall and Toronto police are working together during the investigation and were still on scene Saturday.
Police said the man who lost his fingers in the blast was was arrested as part of a widespread crackdown on dispensaries back in May. He has been identified as David Coleman, 29, and he was charged with possession of a Schedule II substance for the purpose of trafficking and possession of proceeds of crime.
Paramedics said he also suffered serious burns in the blast.
A locator from engineering firm AECON was at the scene Saturday, working to find buried utilities. She said the explosion could have been caused during the extraction process to produce hash oil, which sometimes involves the use of butane gas.
She also said the blast could have been caused in part by an electronic vaporizer.
But Tebby said investigators are still in the preliminary stages of work to determine what caused the blast.
