When the loud rumbles from the southeast began shortly before 9 p.m. Monday in Clinton Township, I assumed it was thunder. With no rain predicted for that night, I wondered whether the weather forecast was simply wrong again. But the rumbles continued for five, 10, and then 20 minutes.
Then they’d stop and start again. Never heard any thunder quite like this, like constant kettle drums. Went outside, where flashes of light streaked from the same direction across the night sky. It looked like lightning, only — incongruously — with bright stars around it at the same time. No, that’s not lightning.
Before long, radio, television, and smartphone internet informed us that all this sound and fury came from a building that caught fire and blew up on 15 Mile Road near Groesbeck in Clinton Township in Macomb County, north of Detroit. Debris killed a 19-year-old guy at a nearby car wash.
Miraculously, he was the only serious casualty. According to the Macomb Daily, township officials said the building was not permitted to store explosive materials. But dozens of canisters there contained butane, nitrous oxide, and lighter fluid. They weighed up to 15 pounds each.
They rained down like missiles upon the roofs of nearby neighborhoods and businesses, sometimes smashing apart and stabbing their jagged edges into the ground. Double-edged knives were said to be among the debris field that was at least a mile wide in circumference from this warehouse.
“They brought things in the back door that we didn’t know about,” township supervisor Bob Cannon told Channel 4, speaking about what was stored at Goo Smoke Shop and Select Distributors, which shared the same building. “We won’t rest until we find out what happened, how it happened and who’s responsible.”
The dead man was identified as Turner Lee Salter, survived by two parents and three siblings. He was an active member of Clinton Township’s Faith Baptist Church, which will host a visitation for him Thursday night and a funeral on Friday at 9 a.m.
The church is on the corner of Little Mack and 15 Mile, not far from where Salter died of blunt force trauma to the head from airborne shrapnel. His pastor, Tim Berlin, described him in the Macomb Daily as “just a joy to be around” and a person who “was so kind, always happy, someone who embraced life.”
In some ways it was almost a relief Monday night to learn that this terrifying mess was probably “only” an accident and not like something you might see on TV from the war in Gaza. Or something like that chemical train wreck last year in Ohio. Or something like 9/11.
Or the beginning of The Road by Cormac McCarthy or even the Book of Revelation. Take your pick. Clinton Township is not far from Selfridge Air National Guard Base. At first, after the constant rumble wouldn’t stop, I wondered if it was the sound of many jets taking off at the same time.
But the following explosions sounded more like fireworks, the kind they have around the Fourth of July at the Clinton Township Civic Center; but they went on far too long for even a grand finale. And those festive rockets red-glaring don’t send jagged chunks of heavy metal down upon the citizens.
In one of life’s little ironies, some of the chemicals that blew up in Clinton Township Monday are used for vaping products, which are used to consume tobacco or marijuana through vapor and without more harmful smoke.
Last year, a Mount Clemens marijuana retailer called JARS on Groesbeck tried to use a patch of Clinton Township land as a parking lot for its employees. However, Clinton Township rejected that attempt and has voted against legalized marijuana sales.
A growing community that almost encircles Mount Clemens, Clinton Township includes more than 100,000 citizens. One of them is the rapper Eminem, who owns a mansion. It’s a growing exurb with a blue-collar edge, just south of the Macomb County farm belt and just west of Lake St. Clair.
Last September, during the United Auto Workers’ strike against the Detroit Three auto companies, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump rallied in Clinton Township at a non-union parts shop, about six miles north of Monday’s blast site.
And the blast made you worry and wonder:
• Was it arson? Did someone set this fire for fun or revenge?
• How many other buildings are storing explosives that aren’t supposed to be there and — absent tipsters — how would anyone ever know?
• What if this had happened in the middle of the day, with people on the job and school buses among thick traffic nearby?
• What about terrorists? If this sort of damage can happen by accident or arson, what sort of malice might result from a purposeful political attack inflicted upon a legitimate site with stored explosives?
• And what about those freight trains with their romantic whistles in the night? Accidentally or intentionally, if they carry toxic chemicals, might they ignite near you?
Sleep tight, Clinton Township.
Joe Lapointe
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