Silas (son of Silas)
In need of restoration.
- Messages
- 165
I spotted a couple of welding related Darwin Awards:
(1 January 2004, Singapore) If you ever find yourself with a leaking fuel tank on your motorbike, be sure to heed this lesson from a 39-year-old man from the Bukit Panjang neighborhood. He removed the leaky tank from the bike and carried it to his sixth-floor flat, where he drained the gasoline into a pail in his toilet. Considering what happened next, it was fortunate that nobody else was in the flat, and that nobody was standing on manhole covers a block away.
He lit a propane torch, planning to solder the hole in the tank. Unfortunately, gasoline that had spilled on his hand caught fire. Frantically trying to extinguish the flames by plunging his hand into the toilet, he ignited the gasoline fumes coming from the pail. The toilet was engulfed in a ball of fire, and the explosion "shook the block." Smoke poured out of the bathroom window.
That was just the beginning. Some of the burning gasoline spilled down a floor drain and into the sewer system, where it mingled with sewer gas and set off a massive underground explosion. Startled residents watched in amazement as one manhole cover was "blown to pieces," and two others popped open. People fled their homes, fearing disaster.
The man survived all of this chaos with minor burns on his left hand, for which he refused treatment.
(February 2003, Australia) A homeowner was doing some welding on the roof of his house at Port Macquarie in New South Wales. He had problems with his oxyacetylene tanks slipping, so he decided to tack weld them to the roofing iron. That was the last thing he ever did. When I passed the house the next day, there wasn't much left of the roof on that side of the house.
Darwin says, "Could this actually happen? A request for confirmation on www.DarwinAwards.com went unanswered, but details were discussed. The incident occurred in Australia, home to many metal roofs, where repairs are often most easily accomplished using oxyacetylene welding instead of less volatile forms of electric-arc welding. Pure acetylene is explosive at a mere 15 pounds of pressure per square inch, and can also explode when exposed to air.
So what happened here? One possibility is that our homeowner, blithely blow-torching the tank for the tack weld, heated it and created enough pressure to turn it into a giant bomb. Another possibility is that the weld weakened the tank enough to allow a leak, which exposed the acetylene to air: KABOOM. A third possibility is that the heat increased the pressure, which popped open relief valves, creating a blowtorch with a 6,000-degree (F) flame, easily hot enough to melt part of the roof and catch the wooden framing on fire. A fourth possibility is that the tank's relief valve turned it into a flaming rocket, which shot into the house and set the whole place on fire.