Fire blamed on overweight dead man
A bit of an unusual call in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania Thursday morning. The responded because a 500-pound man was on fire. The man was supposed to be on fire. He was dead and being cremated. But it turns out he was a little big for the oven. This may remind you a very similar call in Henrico County, Virginia (click here for that story).
On Thursday morning, the East Harrisburg Cemetery was cremating an over-sized body of more than 500 pounds, which caused more sparks, smoke and flames than normal. So workers called the fire department.
“Very strange call. Normally you see a lot of smoke from the oven itself but there’s not a lot from the sides of the oven. But that’s what happened here,” Edgemont Fire Company Chief Kelvin Seigle. “In more than 20 years, I’ve never seen something like this.”