Jet Engine Used in Lab Explodes; 2 Hurt
An aircraft jet engine used for instruction exploded Thursday at a College of San Mateo aeronautical class, hurling shrapnel as far as 30 feet and injuring two students, one seriously, police reported.
The seriously hurt man is 20-year-old Ellison Lowrimore of San Bruno, whose left leg was reported badly injured by flying fragments. He was in surgery at Mills Memorial Hospital hours after the 9:15 a.m. blast in a fenced-in area outside the aeronautical lab.
The school is about 15 miles south of San Francisco and part of the California community college system.
Four students were working on the engine when the explosion occurred. Lowrimore was about 20 feet away working on another engine at the time of the explosion, campus Police Chief Pat Reeve said.
Another aeronautical student, William Costello, 21, of Kentfield, was working on the engine that blew up, but he was slightly injured and taken to Stanford Medical Center for treatment.
Reeve said that as the engine accelerated out of control, it started to “throw off” parts of the machine, finally going into such high revolutions that it exploded. The police chief said things started going wrong when “a large gear flew off the engine.”
Reeve, who theorized that an engine governor may have been at fault, said an investigation is under way to find out what went wrong.
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