Snowmobile fire prompts warning from parents of 7-year-old boy
A seven-year-old boy was pinned under his burning snowmobile last week on the Northern Peninsula, but his father says he's not injured, just shaken up.
Perry Sturge said his son Ethan was out riding his youth snowmobile at his grandparents' house in Great Brehat, near St. Anthony, when Ethan started calling out, "Dad! Dad!"
"When I looked over, here he was, of course, half bottom-up with the snow machine on his leg," said Sturge.
"I started walking across the road, and then I just noticed what looked like steam to me, and as I got going I [realized] that's smoke."
"Then I took off, I ran over there," Sturge told CBC Radio's Central Morning Show from his home in St. Chads, on the Eastport Peninsula.
"And when I got across the road where he was at, I could see the flames, so I just grabbed a hold by the arms and pulled him out from underneath the snow machine, right?"
He said Ethan's clothes were soaked in gasoline, and if there hadn't been anyone watching him the situation would have been a lot worse.
He's not sure why the snowmobile caught fire like that, and said he's tipped over a snow machine a number of times and never had an incident.
'The simplest thing could go wrong'
Sturge said Ethan was "pretty stressed about it," and went inside to clean up right away.
"He came out and cuddled with mom and had a bit of cry there, and he said he thought of what it could have been," his dad said, but was out snowmobiling again the next day.
Still, Sturge said they learned their lesson.
"Don't have your kids unsupervised, that's the most important thing."
"You might think it's harmless enough just to go on a site or by someone's house. I'll tell you the simplest thing could go wrong, right?"
It was flat terrain, according to Sturge, but there was one little bump Ethan just hit the wrong way and if he had been any further away, it could have had a very different outcome.
Sturge said he was pretty scared himself "after the reality sank in, of what could have happened."
As for the snowmobile, he dropped that off at the dump in St. Anthony.
