My wife and I drove from Toronto to Colorado. No particular place in Colorado, we wanted to explore all over the state. After crossing the border from Ontario into Michigan, we stopped at a supermarket, where we loaded up with cold cuts, breads, cookies and other treats, soft drinks, snack foods, and other such things that would work for lunch at Interstate rest stops. Our plan worked well, and I-80 to me will always mean pulling over for a ham and cheese on rye with yellow mustard, with a can of Coke. But we got a lot of things at that supermarket in Michigan, and by the time we got to Colorado, there were some things we hadn’t yet started in on.
Well, we did explore around the state. Even spent a night at the Stanley Hotel, in Estes Park. The next day we set off for Rocky Mountain National Park via (IIRC) US34, which would take us up to 12,000 feet altitude, over the continental divide.
Somewhere above the tree line, we heard a “boom!” from the back of our SUV. I was driving, and my wife, in the passenger seat, turned around.
The bag of potato chips that we had bought in Michigan, and had not opened, had exploded in the rarified atmosphere at that altitude. We were fine, our SUV was fine, there was no problem. Except for the chips scattered around the back.
I took a municipal bus ride that had a booming incident. A huge truck narrowly side swiped the bus, took the half-meter side mirror off and gave us a booming hit-and-run in the process. I sat right behind the driver when it happened at a bus stop. Naturally all the passengers and I disembarked and retraced to the bus station. A less memorable but hilarious part was hearing the bus driver growl out a pejorative phrase one couldn’t utter in this thread.
I also have a 'Things in Your Kitchen That Go “Boom!” story I just remembered…
Many years ago when I was a young man not too long out of college, living on my own barely making ends meet, I was making dinner. I had something steaming or boiling in a pot. I had a hodge-podge of kitchen stuff, and I didn’t have a top for the pot, so when I needed to cover it I made do with a shallow Pyrex glass baking dish I happened to have that just fit on top of the pot. It’s oven-safe, why not? I had used it as a stove top pot cover dozens of times before with no incident.
I had my back to that boiling or steaming setup, prepping other stuff at the counter, when suddenly BOOM! Millions of tiny chunks of Pyrex glass exploded out in all directions, including pelting me on the back. Thank God I had my back to it. I was finding tiny chunks of glass in odd corners of my kitchen for months afterward.
I later learned that Pyrex had a history of sometimes exploding like that under certain heat conditions, or at least an older version of Pyrex-- I think they have since improved its safety since then.
I’m assuming you lost your meal because I can’t see how shards wouldn’t have gone into the steaming pot itself. Not necessarily, but I can’t see how that’s a chance you could take.
I don’t remember what I did for dinner after that, but yeah, I’m sure whatever I was steaming was a total loss.
One saving grace to the Pyrex pyrotechnics was that the Pyrex exploded into chunks, like windshield safety glass, not razor-sharp shards like ordinary window glass. Whether that was a Pyrex safety feature or just some inherent quality to Pyrex glass I don’t know, but if it had been shards like window glass, things would have been much more dire.
Huh, we used to have Pyrex plates, until we moved to a house with a tile floor in the kitchen. We had little kids, too. One by one, the played were dropped and exploded into a thousand razor sharp shards, all over the kitchen.
Okay, the last few plates were removed, not dropped. But those little explosions were spectacular. And surprisingly loud, too. So i guess this post is more on-topic than i realized.
We had a lab accident once. Fellow pulled out two powerful hotplates, turned them all the way up, and put Pyrex glass baking dishes on them. Soon one of the dishes exploded, so he turned that hotplate off and picked up all the glass pieces. Then he mixed a big beaker, maybe 2 liters, of sulfuric acid solution, and poured it into the remaining baking dish, which of course promptly exploded. I was working nearby and barely registered what was going on until the last moment, when I ducked behind a benchtop and gave out some sort of a yell.
He did that after the first dish had exploded? Was he trying to get horribly maimed?!? Were you and he ok after that?
So your Pyrex did explode into razor-sharp shards, huh? That’s odd, I distinctly remember being relieved that my Pyrex exploded into chunks like safety glass, not shards. Were those like dinner plates, to eat off of? Could they have been ordinary glass, and not Pyrex, which is a special heat resistant type of glass? Glad no one was hurt (I assume).
They were actually Corelle, from Corning. And they started as a set, with big plates, little plates, bowls, and cups. I still have the cups, maybe because i mostly use them for preparing recipes, and didn’t put them on the table where small children dropped them. (The cups are useful for separating eggs, or prepping all the spices to added later, etc.)
And they were incredibly sharp, much moreso than an ordinary glass item.
I don’t think anyone was ever hurt, but it was a process to clean up, and no one could go barefoot in the kitchen for a day, for safety.
Background: Flight attendants generally bring food from home to eat while traveling for 3 or 4 days. Some combo of being poorly paid and dietarily fussy. Their only break time to feed themselves during the workday is between flights after the last of the passengers are off and before the next batch has started boarding.
So there we are sitting at the gate with nobody but crew onboard. I’m sitting in my seat, the cockpit door is propped open, and suddenly I smell smoke. And not just a faint whiff. Fire inflight is a nightmare scenario and fire at the gate isn’t that much better. Smells like burning paper or wood, not plastic or petroleum. A good omen. So far.
I leap up and out into the galley to see smoke billowing from the vent of a galley oven. Flip closed the vent cover & turn off the oven heat. The ovens are the designated place to put anything like a burning laptop or other randomly set fire, so at least we’re having our accidental fire in the right place. I yell for the FAs who are, as usual, lounging in the first class seats nearby.
Turns out Jane was heating her lunch. The smoke eventually cleared enough we could open the oven. And there it sat. A pop-top can of Campbells soup. With the top having been removed thank goodness. But the paper label left on to burn; there was just a hint of red & white paper left amongst the char.
I didn’t need to give her any counseling for that dangerous mistake; the other FAs were doing a great job of tearing her up one side and down the other.
We kept that airplane for 3 more flights that day and it still smelled like a campfire in the forward galley & entry area when we parked it for the night.
Another day we were descending into IIRC Seattle where there were a bunch of wildfires along our path and we’d be going through at least a bit of the smoke.
Partway through descent I made a PA about that. For that reason. “Hey folks, as you’ve probably heard on the news there’s a bunch of forest fires around here. The smoke is everywhere and we’re going to be flying through some of it. If you see or smell campfire smoke in the cabin, don’t get upset. The ground’s on fire, not us.”
Sure enough, we went through some of the very thinned out smoky areas and the airplane got that cozy campfire aroma permeated through it. For a few minutes.
I imagine some folks noticed. I imagine some folks said something to the FAs guarding the boarding door or maybe even later.
I’d decided not to call attention to it and whatever issues any passengers had were handled by the FAs without my involvement. If anyone had noped out at that point we’d have ended up w a gate agent onboard to fiddle with getting them and their stuff off the airplane and out of the computer. That didn’t happen, so I concluded nobody noped out.
I was just fine. I couldn’t close my mouth for a little while, but that was because I was expressing slack-jawed amazement. I don’t remember him needing medical attention, but it’s hard to imagine he didn’t at least get numerous tiny acid burns. This was about 45 years ago; safety standards have improved since.
Another thing I remember him doing is pouring flammable solvents down an ordinary sink drain, and then soon afterwards tossing his lit cigarette butt down there. It ignited and blew ugly black crud all over the drop ceiling above.
