It was an accident that could have ended in tragedy. But thanks to a rice cooker no one was seriously injured.

It was a sunny afternoon at Camp Pupukea on the North Shore. Cub Scout Pack 311 was about to eat lunch when a cooking mishap changed the trajectory of the day.

“We were cooking lunch. All the different scouts, different dens have their lunches going. One of the dens was using a small butane stove to cook a pot of chili. They just finished cooking it and were serving it up and the stove exploded,” explained Pack 311 Cub Master Jack Shriver.

Witnesses said it made a huge boom and sounded like a firework going off. The stove was placed at one end of a brown picnic table with a rice cooker just on the other side of it toward the middle of the table. There were about 30 kids surrounding the table because they were learning how to cook for their cooking merit badge.

There is black burn on the table where the butane canister was. The top of the butane can blew completely off shooting the canister into the rice cooker with such tremendous force it left a huge dent in the white rice cooker. You could imagine what would have happened if the rice cooker wasn’t there.

“We got fortunate that only three people were injured and the injuries were minor…one of the kids got a small 1st degree burn on his leg, one of the young girls got a second-degree burn on the back of her leg and one of the parents got a lacerations above her eye from flying pieces of stove,” explained Shriver.

Witnesses said the little girl was six years old and the boy was around 11. They were both burned by the chili spilled when the stove exploded.

Shriver said he’s been involved with scouts his whole life and has never seen anything like this. They are unsure what caused the stove to explode

“(The stove) still was working and it had been used before. It wasn’t a new stove and so we’re trying to figure that out,” he said.

Shriver said the children and the parent that were injured were treated at camp and did not need to be taken to the hospital. He added that Cub Scout Pack 311 plans to continue on with their weekend at Camp Pupukea.