By 3 News online staff
Two teenage boys have been rushed to hospital with serious burns after a house fire in Dunedin.
The boys were reportedly huffing from a gas canister which set off an explosion at their Mosgiel house.
Firefighters rushed to the scene, and found one of the boys with burns to the inside of his throat.
Trevor Tilyard, assistant Area commander for East Otago says the pair were huffing from two nine kilogram LPG cannisters, but it is two early to tell what ignited the gas.
“It was five degrees at Mosgiel at 2 o’clock so it could have been a heating appliance, or any number of things in the house – if there was gas floating around in the house it could find pretty easily a lot of ignition sources,” says Mr Tilyard.
The explosion damaged walls, moved the home's roof and blew glass onto the road.
The incident follows the recent death of a 12-year-old boy who died in a Christchurch car park after huffing with friends, and Mr Tilyard says the practice is becoming an alarming problem.
“The obviously don’t understand the dangers of doing it, we’ve had four or five incidents of this, either huffing inside cars or inside buildings, [for example] the young fellow that died in Christchurch recently, so it’s an extremely dangerous practice,” he says.
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