4 hurt in explosion at Los Angeles-area industrial park

LOS ANGELES — An explosion at an industrial park near Los Angeles on Tuesday injured four people, three of them critically, authorities said.

The blast was reported at 4:45 p.m. in a neighborhood of Santa Clarita, about 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles. It sparked a small brushfire that was quickly contained.

The blast site was first reported as a movie set, and there are film production facilities for rent nearby. However, authorities later described it as taking place at an industrial park.

“We don’t know what the business was,” said Jonathan Matheny, public information officer for the Los Angeles County Fire Department. “We have no intelligence that leads us to believe that there was any filming of any sort going on.”

The industrial park houses businesses that “range the entire gamut,” including a brewery, storage units, recreational vehicle storage areas and parked tractor-trailers, Matheny said.

There also are other businesses and a housing tract nearby.

The explosion left three men with serious burns. Matheny said they were taken to the hospital in critical but stable condition.

A fourth man later “walked into the ER” for treatment, Matheny said. There was no immediate word on his condition.

Fire spread to a grassy hillside but firefighters were able to quickly douse the flames, Matheny said.

There was no immediate word on what caused the explosion.