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It’s a story worth remembering. Not just because of the remarkable progress that came out of this one incident, but because we still live with the danger. The city is criss-crossed with thousands of kilometres of high-pressure pipelines. This could happen again.

For Peter Clark, the story is personal. He was delivering a load of glass windows for homes under construction in Mill Woods and decided to finish the job before breaking for lunch. He was driving slow and vaguely recalls a white cloud he thought was smoke.

“The next thing I knew, I got this very strong smell of propane. The truck stalled and the world just went up around me in flames,” said Clark, who went back to the scene with me this week to look around. That day he jumped out of the vehicle and ran with his clothes on fire and rolled in the snow. He survived with third-degree burns to 30 per cent of his body. He was in the hospital for nine months.

One of the high-pressure propane lines that still runs under Mill Woods had been nicked by a contractor roughly two weeks earlier. It had three deep gouges and slowly corroded. Propane seeped to the surface, creating a pond 20 metres by 35 metres. While it was cold, the gas hugged the ground and moved slowly. But that morning, the warm sun caused the propane vapour to rise, primed for disaster. The explosion sparked by Clark’s engine burned for 16 hours.

Later, Clark found out he drove down that road just before a school bus full of kindergarten children was scheduled to come through.