Cheers turned to fear at a Florida high school pep rally when a fire-breather accidentally caught fire in front of about 2,000 students.
Daredevil Ricky Charles suffered first-degree burns on Thursday, and the stunt gone wrong led to nearly 20 Atlantic Community High School students needing treatment, with seven getting rushed to hospitals for smoke inhalation, officials said.
“Teachers had to grab fire extinguishers,” senior Lucas Martins told the Sun-Sentinel about the freak fire accident.
“I saw one girl having a seizure on the floor. Some other girl was having asthma problems and couldn’t breathe. They had a huge mess…this one was a crazy one.”
The botched rally was an attempt to get students at the Delray Beach school excited about the impending SATs, the district said.
At the rally, students were peppered with sample test questions. For each right answer, they got a fire trick as a blazing award.
But the pep pandemonium went up in flames — literally — when a hired fire-breather accidentally set himself ablaze while another performer dunked a basketball from a bouncy house.
A video obtained by the Palm Beach Post shows the fire-breather appeared to shoot some flames too close to his face. He then seemed to instinctively wave at his face with a hand holding a can of flammable liquid — setting most of his torso on fire.
Charles, the owner of Inferno’s Challenge, later told WPTV-TV that he’d done the act dozens of times before, but it all went wrong when he tried out a new type of lamp oil.
“So when I did my blast with this new oil, the flame trickled right back down to my face. It caught my face on fire, which is a new thing to me. And that’s when everything just went crazy,” he said.
Students posted videos on social media showing the chaotic scene as screaming teens ran away from the fire blazing in the middle of the packed gymnasium.
Corey Wilson is the parent of an Atlantic High School student.
“She got out, by the grace of God,” Wilson told the NBC affiliate.
Senior Danny Lahav witnessed the inferno.
“We thought it was a joke,” he told the Palm Beach Post. Then chaos erupted and onlookers started screaming.
Fellow senior Alex Yarnall was just feet away from the fiery mishap.
“He started running then dropped, like stop drop and roll,” Yarnall said. That “didn’t help.”
No students suffered serious injuries, and the school day soon resumed as planned, the district said.
Meanwhile, the school is left wondering how wise it was to play with fire-breathers in the first place.
“It’s not unusual for events like this to happen, to have somebody come in like this,” Palm Beach County School District spokeswoman Kathy Burstein told the Palm Beach Post.
“The pyrotechnics — that’s something we have to look at.”
Although events like this one don’t require district approval as of now, pyrotechnics are not allowed on school grounds, Burstein later added.
