Earlier this month 8 Kodiak teenagers were severely injured in an explosion on Kodiak’s White Sands Beach due to a fuel drum being thrown on a fire, and now one of those teenagers is speaking about the experience.
The incident took place back on November 10th, and now Cassandra Canaveral is telling her story.
“I thought I died, because, just, that’s all I saw,” Canaveral said, according to Anchorage Daily News. “All I saw was light for a couple seconds, and then the fire got extinguished.”
“I started feeling my hair and I could pull out some chunks, and I was like, ‘I got burned bad,’” she explained . “So I looked for my friends and I was kind of just — I remember what I was saying the whole time. I was just talking like, ‘I got burned.’”
While her friends tried to tend to Canaveral, her brother called her parents believing that she needed to seek medical attention.
“I met her at the hospital and then I just learned from what she and my son told me — that the kid threw the barrel into the fire and exploded,” Gustavo Canaveral, their father, said.
“She said, ‘Papi, I got burned,’ and I’m thinking like, ‘Yeah, you sure did,’” Gustavo recalled. “It was like the blisters on the skin was sort of like, melting off her face, and her hands were just bloody and black. It was pretty shocking and frightening.”
“I had a small wave of relief then because it was like, OK. It was kind of grounding to (be) seeing my dad there and being like ‘OK, I’m going to get through this,’” Cassandra said of seeing her father arrive.
Scott Ellis is the chief of the Bayside Fire Department and the first emergency responder on the scene, which was initially called in as an uncontrolled fire where several children were injured, but upon arriving he found that all of the teenagers had left and his team found the barrel around 10 feet away from the fire, that was still burning.
Ellis said things could have been much worse.
“That would have been catastrophic,” Ellis said. “You would have had the metal of an everyday 55-gallon metal barrel fracturing catastrophically and moving at very high speeds in multiple directions, shrapnel everywhere.”
Alaska State Troopers have said an unnamed suspect who allegedly threw the fuel drum was taken into custody and held by the state Division of Juvenile Justice.
“I feel so blessed and lucky to have such a tight-knit community,” Cassandra said of the community pitching in to donate to fundraisers. “For a wide majority of people I see every day come together and be so willing to give so much money to people they don’t even know.”
