By Franz-Stefan Gady
A warehouse at a U.S. military base went up in flames last night.
A blast that shattered the U.S. Army’s Sagami General Depot in the city of Sagamihara, approximately 25 miles (40 kilometers) southwest of Tokyo, causing a fire that burned through the night but injuring no one AFP reports.
First reports that a bomb had gone off in the warehouse proved inaccurate. “I thought the American military facility came under a terrorist attack,” a security guard told local media. ”Orange sparks were rising quite high. I couldn’t see smoke but smelled something like gunpowder,” an eye witness noted.
The blast occurred at 12:45am on Monday local time and was extinguished at 7:09am by the local fire department, which dispatched 13 trucks to the site of the explosion, according to the Wall Street Journal
There was some confusion what exactly was stored at the depot. “We coordinated with U.S. fire units, and did not spray water as we waited for information related to what was inside,” a Sagamihara fire department official told AFP.
Read the full story at The Diplomat