Investigation continues into Caledon car fire at gas station

October 3, 2014 · 0 Comments

By Bill Rea
There were no injuries, but a very expensive car was destroyed Sunday after it caught fire at a gas station in Victoria.
Dave Pelaoyo, chief fire prevention officer for Caledon Fire and Emergency Services, said the Porsche 918 Spider caught fire at about 7:23 p.m.
“It’s still under investigation,” he said, adding the cause is not thought to be suspicious.”
Although it happened in a gas station, he said attendants there were able to shut the pumps down before they ignited. There were also efforts to put out the flames with fire extinguishers, but they were not successful.
“We knocked it down really fast once we got there,” Pelaoyo commented, adding crews from the fire stations from Inglewood, Cheltenham and Valleywood responded.
He said the car was worth about $900,000. He added officials from Porsche are being sent over to examine the car.
“It’s a pretty sophisticated piece of equipment,” Pelaoyo commented. “They want engineers in to take a look at it.
CTV News reported the car belonged to Michael Wekerle, a host of the Canadian television show Dragons’ Den.
“It was quite an ordeal,” he told Newstalk 1010’s John Moore Wednesday morning.
He said he had been filling the tank.
“I heard a little pop,” he told Moore, and saw a flame coming out the side of the engine. “It kind of freaked me out.”
Wekerle said he grabbed a fire extinguisher from the passenger side of the car, and there were other people who had extinguishers, but they couldn’t put the flames out.
“Once it started catching fire, you knew it was a real problem,” he said, adding the flames were reaching about 20 feet into the air.
Wekerle said this was one of 918 cars of this model made, as he said there are four officials from Porsche coming from Germany to investigate.
He also observed this event has made the news in Germany, adding he’s heard from a friend who was in Munich at the time.