MA- An explosion just before midnight Friday rocked a Plympton neighborhood so much that some residents thought a plane had crashed.
The blast woke up Chris Badot of Mayflower Road.
We all got up and checked the garage and the basement, said Badot. Had a tree fallen on the house? A small plane crashed nearby? An earthquake?
He and several other neighbors called police, who found nothing that night.
But on Friday morning, a resident discovered the source of the explosion, said Fire Chief David Rich.
A camper parked at the end of a long driveway at 113 Mayflower Road had blown up.
The trailer’s owner was working on the propane heating for the camper at the time of the explosion, and was blown into the woods when the camper exploded, Rich said.
This man is very lucky to survive an explosion that tore the camper apart.
The camper’s owner was relatively unscathed after the blast, Rich said, so much so that he got up, extinguished a small fire and left for a relative’s house, Rich said. When police spoke with him on Friday, the man had singed hair and part of his beard had burned away, Rich said.
Paul Harper, who owns the house at 113 Mayflower Road and allowed the man to store the trailer on his property, may have been the only person in the neighborhood, near Brook and Colchester streets, not to be awakened by the blast.
I had gone to bed, he said
It was unclear whether the 56-year-old man who owns the trailer was living in it at the time, but Rich said he has seen more people move into temporary shelters, such as campers, as home foreclosures are on the rise.
These people are at risk, Rich said, since many campers or trailers aren’t fitted with the safety features or sanitary facilities of a home.
There was a smoke detector in the camper, Rich said, but since it had been blasted off the ceiling of the camper, officials could not tell if it was working.