FIVE GALLONS?! Holy cow! The conflagration from that must’ve been quite the spectacle.
Decades ago I sometimes used gasoline to start fires. I then switched to diesel.
The last thing you want to do is pour out a bunch of gas and then go looking for a match. When you finally light the match, the whole thing becomes one of those “fuel/air bombs”.
Diesel is pretty harmless, at least relative to gasoline. It won’t explode...at least, I’ve not gotten it to, but I’ll keep trying.
Gasoline has a very low flash point diesel and Kerosene have much higher flash point. Put gas in a Kerosene heater and you just made a bomb.
That would've done it.