CLINTON TWP. (WWJ) -- The public is sternly reminded to stay away from the site of Monday night's massive fire and explosions in Clinton Township, and again urged not to pick up the debris.
Reporting from a safe distance on Thursday, WWJ's Mike Campbell watched several people walk around the property of the now-shuttered Select Distributions, at 15 Mile Rd. and Groesbeck.
Sharing video from the site, Campbell said: "This guy is very carefully and very deliberately walking around this fire scene. Hard to say what he's doing, but every now and then he bends down and picks up some cans; usually the nitrous oxide, butane cans that exploded."
"You see the firefighters still up on the ladder with the cannon, shooting the water down. And these guys are out here scrounging around with, you know, people picking them up, driving off with one or two or three. The fire chief says don't do it."
Authorities have warned people in the area that some of these cans have not yet exploded, and could yet explode.
And you don't want that to happen in your hand, or in your car.
"The canisters are a problem for two reasons," Clinton Township Supervisor Bob Cannon said. "One, the ones that have exploded have their jagged edges, so people could get hurt picking those up; they could get cut. And there are some that did not explode... We don't want anybody to pick these up."
One local TV news station brought a canister into their studio earlier this week, setting a questionable example.
Township officials are working with the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad, Cannon said, to make sure the cannisters are safely picked up and secured, in the interest of public safety. "We have collected 15 yards of debris as far out as two miles. So this explosion sent a lot of debris out into the community," Cannon said Tuesday.
The Bomb Squad has since retrieved some from scrap yards where people were hoping to get paid, police said.
One person, a 19-year-old man Clinton Twp. man who'd stopped to watch the fire from about 1/4 mile away, was killed by a flying cannister that hit him in the head.
While the investigation into the fire is still ongoing, Cannon said it's believe the company was storing some items it should not have been storing. Cannon said Select Distributor was licensed only as a commercial business selling various items including knives, lighter fluid and vape pens.
Authorities are asking people who finds these cannisters to call the Macomb County Sheriff's Office non-emergency line at 586-469-5502 so that the items may be disposed of safely.