Incendiary moments - reprise

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vernon

Harder than Ronnie Pickering
Location
Meanwood, Leeds
Last night during an episode of 'Would I lie to You?', Bob Mortimer recalled an incident, when he was seven years old, when he set fire to his house with a box of fireworks when the sparks from a sparkler fell into a box of fireworks and during his speedy despatching of the box to the kitchen, one of the fireworks fell out and set fire to the living room and rendering the family homeless. As he was interrogated by the other contestants and revealed other 'facts', my wife and daughter were incredulous and stated confidently that he'd stretched credibility beyond breaking point.

I confidently voted his tale to be true. It was. They'd forgotten about my own fireworks in the kitchen incident and when I pointed this out they reminded that Mortimer's story couldn't possibly be true because he claimed to be seven years old at the time.

I knew differently.......

As a seven year old living with grandparents, I had the task of lighting the fire first thing in the morning in my grandfather's room - he was incapacitated by emphysema and lived downstairs in one of the rooms with a fireplace. I took the task very seriously and looked forward to Saturday mornings when I not only lit the fire but also got to blacklead the grate. I used to get a buzz if there were glowing embers from the previous day's fire and I could relight a fire without having to totally clear the grate and resorting to newspaper and kindling.

One particular morning I detected the presence of glowing embers and decided that I was going to try a new method of re-ignition. I'd been given a chemistry set for Christmas which proved to be a major disappointment. It provided no flashes, bangs or smells and using logwood as an indicator quickly lost its interest. The one redeeming feature of the set was the spirit burner designed to use meths. I'd experimented with a range of fuels and had settled on paraffin as there was always some to hand. The paraffin in my lamp was going to be the agent of re-ignition.

I carefully rearranged the cinders and embers into a pyramid on the grate and gingerly poured the paraffin onto it. Disappointingly I didn't get a gently waving yellow sooty flame as expected. I was rewarded with a grey/white mist. Striking a match and putting into the mist delivered more than I bargained for. There was a dull thud preceded by a bright yellow flash and a wave of warmth radiating from the hearth. My hair and eyebrows were shortened and my grandfather developed a speed and agility last witnessed in his early twenties as he parted company with his folding bed.

A low pitched howl started. It wasn't me - I was too stunned to make any sort of noise and I wasn't 'leathered' until there was an absence of witnesses.. The howl was coming from the fireplace. I'd managed to set fire to the soot lining the flue to the chimney. I was taken outside rather violently and was made to inspect the damage. Flames and smoke were shooting from the chimney accompanied by a low howling/rumbling noise. A neighbour rang for the fire brigade. They arrived and decided that the best course of action was to let the fire burn itself out after blocking the air supply in the grate.

I just pleaded guilty and waited for the inevitable pain of a slapped admonition.

I felt for Bob Mortimer. Although I laughed at his tale I recognised and shared his panic.
 

Mad Doug Biker

Banned from every bar in the Galaxy
Location
Craggy Island
About the closest I got was putting an aerosol on the fire at home and wondering why everyone was suddenly so keen to get it out again as quickly as possible!
I also seem to remember setting fire to the carpet and rug a few times, but that was nothing a good stamp of the foot couldn't sort.
 
OP
OP
vernon

vernon

Harder than Ronnie Pickering
Location
Meanwood, Leeds
I also seem to remember setting fire to the carpet and rug a few times, but that was nothing a good stamp of the foot couldn't sort.


Don't count on it working every time.....

Some time ago I retold the incendiary tale of me lighting a rocket in the kitchen and the ensuing mayhem when things went pear shaped.

Yesterday witnessed another insane but milder incendiary incident which was avoidable of pre-existing knowledge had been recalled and deployed.

After the evening meal, I was sitting at the computer desk typing away and miding my own business when two of my offspring improvised a game of table tennis using their hands and a ping pong ball. After several glancing blows to my body I suffered a direct hit to my eye and decided to end the game forever.

I seized the ping pong ball with one hand and retrieved a chef,s blow torch from the back of the desk, lit the torch and then used the flame to ignite the ping pong ball - mistake number one. The celluloid is very flammable.

I succeeded in blowing out the flames but my smugness was premature. The ping pong ball spontaneously re-ignited - mistake number two - I'd forgotten that very flammable should have read extremely flamable.

Good bye smug grin, hello wide eyed panic preceding a panic driven juggling of a fiery chunk of plastic until the heat resistance of my epidermis was compromised and I dropped the burning remains on the not so cheap woollen carpet and stood on them to put them out. Lifting my foot the extinguished remains re-ignited. Mistake number three - extremely flammable should be replaced with extremely f'kin flammable.

Having failed to be educated by mistakes one to three I stood on the burning remains again and again for mistkes four and five until the fourth stamp successfully extinguished the flames.

My kids were in agony from laughing, my wife was in pain from screaming at me and I am currently living in Coventry being unable to apologise without laughing.

The damage to the carpet has proved to be minimal with a mild scorching only just visible.


Thing is, I knew how rapidly celluloid from ping pong balld burned - I'd just forgotten/failed to make the right connections before I embarked on the trip to internal exile.

For those who want to explore the flammability of ping pong balls a tad more safely and impress the offspring with the effects:

1, cut a ping pong ball into small pieces.

2. Wrap the pieces in aluminium foil.

3. Roast the foil with a match or a lighter.

4. When smoke emerges from the foil drop it onto a saucer and watch the device fill a small room with smoke and the smell of wintergreen - your very first smoke bomb.

Shame I'd forgotten about the smoke bomb. Its recollection might have saved the day yesterday :biggrin:


Maybe not :biggrin:
 

Brains

Legendary Member
Location
Greenwich
A friend of mine, (really), was camping down in Asdown Forest one weekend, he and his girlfriend were there for a bit of walking and to help with the replanting of an area of the forest that had been decimated by a fire a couple of years earlier.
Having found a discreet spot within walking distance of the local pub thy got out the cooking gear prior to putting up the tent as it was a bit early for that sort of thing.
To cut a story short, the camp stove fell over, started a small grass fire which they could not put out, and as the fire raged all they could do was pack up their kit and run for it to a hotel in Ringwood
The fire brigade turned up, and dozens of volunteers spent the night trying to minimise the area of the fire.
As they sat in bed in the hotel the next morning their handiwork was all over the news as several square miles of the forest had burned overnight
 

MontyVeda

a short-tempered ill-controlled small-minded troll
What a wonderfully written account of your childhood foray into pyromania Vernon!

As a child aged about 8, a box of matches, costing a mere 3p was a cost effective and fun alternative to a Bazooka Joe bubble gum and a couple of Blackjacks... as long as you muttered the magic 'for my mum' at time of purchase, any newsagent would happily hand over a tiny box of potential death to a youngster. The magic 'for my mum' also worked when purchasing cigarettes, in spite of the fact my mum never smoked... any how, a box of matches in an 8 year old's hands, an 8 year old determined to start a fire... not to burn anything down, but to bask in the warmth of a little camp fire like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer would have done... a small camp fire would have been nice. What i didn't bank on was the flames rapidly spreading up the tinder-dry railway embankment, with nothing but my tiny foot to try stamp them out. So I'm panicking and stamping, not having much impact on the out of control fire which by now is several square feet in size and only getting bigger... a 'man' appeared with much bigger feet and together we stopped the spread and put the fire out. I told him I was just riding past and noticed it... I think he believed me, but i'll never be sure.

Another incendiary tale... I'm aged 20-21, living in a squalid basement flat some fifty yards down the road from where i currently live. The little light from the two small windows went suddenly red and I thought, what the feck is that? So I opened the front door and found the source of the red was a fire engine parked outside. On the pavement are my neighbours; Tony, a metalhead in his mid twenties, complete wit Def Lepard t-shirt, bleached jeans and Dunlop green flash trainers... a look of shame all over his face, and Inch, a biker and midget/dwarf clad in leather waistcoat and greasy jeans, looking up at Tony and shouting "You stupid basterd!" and other obscenities ... Tony, nice but a bit dim was trying to light a fire, and not getting very far he decided a little petrol would help (he had a dissembled motorbike in the kitchen, with the petrol from the tank in a bucket)... Now Tony isn't an idiot... so instead of pouring the petrol direct from the bucket, he used a spoon instead, making sure the bucket of petrol was a safe distance from the hearth. What he didn't realise was that each time he spooned a little petrol on the fire, he left a tiny trail of drips from the hearth back to the bucket.. and the few spoonfuls of petrol were a million times more effective than he'd bargained for.

It's like Home Truths this thread.
 

PK99

Legendary Member
Location
SW19
Not my misdeed but...

I decided to take over the job of building the local school's annual bonfire when I saw the previous i/c lighting it. They had left a tunnel into the heart of the pile of pallets etc and set a small starter fire in there. To which they had (as subsequent events so amply demonstrated) added petrol or paraffin, the guy went into the quite narrow tunnel with a box of matches and reappeared a few moments later like a champagne cork out of a well shaken bottle.
 

TheDoctor

Noble and true, with a heart of steel
Moderator
Location
The TerrorVortex
A few years ago I got a small fire going in the back garden to get rid of a load of prunings, clippings and general not-as-combustible-as-all-that rubbish.
It duly went out.
Off I went and came back with the accelerant of choice - a gallon of unleaded.
I casually sploshed some on.
It was then I discovered that the fire was not entirely out...
A small but lively sheet of flame travelled up the stream of petrol to the plastic container. I'm now holding a potential firebomb that's getting rather warm. I threw the burning can onto the fire, and ran.
A very few seconds later there was an almighty "WHOOOOMF!!!!" and a mahoosive fireball engulfed the fire, the fence and a 50-foot high sycamore tree. The fence was OK, but the tree lost quite a lot of foliage. And I very nearly wrecked a perfectly good pair of underpants.
 

stowie

Legendary Member
One of my friends, with a long garden, used to host an annual fireworks night. This consisted of heavy drinking and explosives - a combination that probably isn't the wisest in the first place. My friend and his brother are incredibly intelligent people (one with a phd the other runs his own business) until it comes to fireworks. Then it seems that they revert to the mind of a dim-witted teenager with behavioral issues.

One year they constructed two super fireworks from the large box of fireworks they had bought. They did this by scooping out the dangerous stuff from everything and putting half into the largest rocket and the other half into a ball type firework that was supposed to give a floor show.

The huge rocket went first - I was safely in the house looking out of the window at this point. Unfortunately the rocket - top heavy with vast quantities of gunpowder - fell over and pointed directly at my group of friends watching. It shot off at around groin level as my friends scattered. One jumped into the shed on the left of the garden for shelter. Unfortunately the rocket glanced off the ground at that point which sent it spinning through the shed window. My friend managed to do a spectacular commando style roll out of the door as behind him the rocket exploded blowing out the remaining shed windows with the ensuing fireball which cast an orange glow around the image of my friend. It was really rather spectacular and something worthy of a Hollywood stuntman.

Undeterred they decided to try out the ball firework. This, if anything, had even more gunpowder in it. It went off with an enormous force which gouged out a crater in the garden and send clods of earth some considerable distance into the sky. The house roof and windows got splattered with mud. The neighbours' houses got showered in mud and bits of plant. A large stone got flung through the neighbour's conversatory. Part of the fence fell down. Car alarms all over the neighbourhood were going off and neighbours ran out under the assumption that they were the victims of some act of terrorism. My friend's garden looked like the Somme. My friends were covered in mud, some had minor shrapnel wounds. My friend and his brother spend a rather large amount of money repairing the damage; it would appear that house insurance didn't cover acts of total stupidity.

I didn't go to the one the next year..
 
The huge rocket went first - I was safely in the house looking out of the window at this point. Unfortunately the rocket - top heavy with vast quantities of gunpowder - fell over and pointed directly at my group of friends watching. It shot off at around groin level as my friends scattered. One jumped into the shed on the left of the garden for shelter. Unfortunately the rocket glanced off the ground at that point which sent it spinning through the shed window. My friend managed to do a spectacular commando style roll out of the door as behind him the rocket exploded blowing out the remaining shed windows with the ensuing fireball which cast an orange glow around the image of my friend. It was really rather spectacular and something worthy of a Hollywood stuntman.

Undeterred they decided to try out the ball firework. This, if anything, had even more gunpowder in it. It went off with an enormous force which gouged out a crater in the garden and send clods of earth some considerable distance into the sky. The house roof and windows got splattered with mud. The neighbours' houses got showered in mud and bits of plant. A large stone got flung through the neighbour's conversatory. Part of the fence fell down. Car alarms all over the neighbourhood were going off and neighbours ran out under the assumption that they were the victims of some act of terrorism. My friend's garden looked like the Somme. My friends were covered in mud, some had minor shrapnel wounds. My friend and his brother spend a rather large amount of money repairing the damage; it would appear that house insurance didn't cover acts of total stupidity.

I didn't go to the one the next year..


:laugh::laugh::laugh:
 

Arch

Married to Night Train
Location
Salford, UK
My friend managed to do a spectacular commando style roll out of the door as behind him the rocket exploded blowing out the remaining shed windows with the ensuing fireball which cast an orange glow around the image of my friend. It was really rather spectacular and something worthy of a Hollywood stuntman.



When I was a student, one year a bunch of us clubbed together to buy some fireworks for November the 5th. Stupidly, we gave the collection to one among us who was a very gung ho sort of girl (she'd go off for a weekend sailing, and ring in on Monday to say she couldn't make lectures, as she was in France). We told her to get some decent stuff, but on no account to buy any of the really big rocket bundles, as we were going to let them off in a small garden.

Of course, she went and got the biggest bundle she could find. We found a bit of wasteland near the party house, and the two most sensible chaps went and placed the bundle, ordering the rest of us to stay well back, which we did.

They lit the thing, and ran back to us. When it started to go off, they were halfway back, and both performed Hollywood style leaps, backframed by brilliant explosions. Nothing actually went wrong, but we didn't let her buy fireworks again....
 

stu9000

Senior Member
Location
surrey
When camping in the middle of nowhere in Scotland I put a small camping gas cylinder in a fire. I really don't recommend this.

We retired to a safe distance, got a bit nervous and retired a bit more. waited. waited.

When it went off it was like nothing I've heard or seen before or since. The large fire was gone. I mean disappeared. In it's place were lots of little fires which we put out without further incident.

The cylinder must have hit the camping saucepans cos they were caved in so much I could not separate them. that was a bit sobering.

When we packed the tent there was a neat unblemished rectangle.

The things u do when you're young.
 
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