Put about a pint of petrol on as yet unlit bonfire. Then went down the garden to get the stick with burning rag on the end of it and walked back towards bonfire, cue Backdraft, fire running along the ground moment and the bonfire lighting with a large woomph.

Failed to learn from that and a few months later disintegrated a huge pile of embers and ash with a small camping gas cylinder. The 20ft wide fireball that incinerated the apple tree was spectacular, not so spectacular was leaping fences to put out fires started in neighbours gardens by the now very well lit embers.

I have mainly been a good boy since then………

I’m so glad its not just me who has had a major fire incident.
Set a large mound of tarmac on fire with John Siddalls dads lawn mower fuel . I have no idea why .

Set the Scouts camp bonfire alight , possibly a good 5 hours before they wanted it lit , but it was always too hot for proper jacket pots anyway..

Set myself on fire and had to be blue lighted to hospital after pouring alot of 2 stroke ‘Nitro’ fuel from a RC car onto a fire that wasnt quite ‘out’ . Cue big fire ball and me doing a good impression of the Renault F1 refuelling man from 1999. Had to have gauze mesh taped to my head , burnt pretty much everything nipples upwards .

Flooded my Saab 900 T16s after hotwiring it having lost the keys and guessing wrongly which wires to twist together . took out plugs and cranked engine over , resulting in a petrol fountain that sprayed about 10ft into the air . My mate Dec and I both hit the ground expecting the ‘woomph’ as the vapours rolled down in a boiling clound inside a certain multi story car park in Woking . Would have been a tricky one to explain away that .

On a still winters night after trying unsucessfully to get a large pile of very wet garden waste to light, I decided on the petrol from the lawn mower. I poured the petrol over the pile, then realised I had left the matches in the shed, went back to the shed then decided some lit paper would be the safest way to start the burn. So went into the house to get a couple of sheets of news paper. Once back at the pile of waste, I lit the paper and threw it on from a safe distance and then walked down the garden towards the house.

At this point the fire caught as did the vapour from the petrol, which had flowed down the garden to where I was standing. From the explosion I reccon it was about a foot deep, luckilly for me it mostly went up with a loud WHOOP. I just about shat myself and my missus wet her self laughing at me jumping a few feet in the air.

NYE wild camping in Brecon when it was snowing, so available wood supply a bit wet. Being very drunk and holding a petrol can which is on fire is highly amusing, as is the resultant “scorched earth” fallout when a discus style throw of said petrol can becomes preferable to imminent explosion.

Aged 10, set my mates garage on fire, on the first occasion I was allowed to play at theirs. Ironically that was because they had the rep of being the local naughty kids. I wasn’t invited back 😥

One morning years ago I got out of the shower and realised I had run out of deodorant. So on the way to work I stpped at the local Spar and bought a can of Right Guard. Back in my car I gave my armpits a generous squirt.

And then lit a cigarette.

There was a mighty flash and I could smell singed hair for days….

My uncle burnt half his house down.

The lesson he learnt was when you fire up the caterham 7 your building in the garage for the first time. Make sure:

A: all the fuel lines are properly connected
B: start it up on the driveway, not the garage attached to the house

We have a ‘lucky to be alive’ club in our family. I’m in it but nothing petrol related. My uncle’s in it for the petrol on damp bonfire thing. If he didn’t have a big pond in his garden (and the sense to jump into it) he wouldn’t be in the club.

He also got a helicopter ride out of it, from Cornwall to somewhere in the Midlands (Birmingham, I think).

Had an entertaining garden bonfire once, in central Birmingham

It was some sort of cypress cuttings, helped on with a “dribble” of the crap you get in the bottom of your chain cleaning pot, oh, and a bit of painted wood. All in one of those “old dustbin” incinerators

I admit it did get quite lively but no big deal, I thought

… til my wife called down the garden to tell me there was a man at the door with his mates, all in a big red van with a ladder and some blue lights after a neighbour had called it in 😳

(by then it had pretty much burnt off the oil and was just a very boring bondie indeed)

Genuinely chuckling at all of these

I had about 1/2 a litre of old petrol i’d used for cleaning a manky bike chain. I then had the problem of how to dispose of it. I had the bright idea that if I put it in the metal wheel barrow I could burn it. This is an effective way of disposal but (1) the flames were a lot taller than I expected (2) they last a lot longer than I expected (3) there is a lot more black smoke than I expected. I bottled it because I thought one of the neighbours would call the fire brigade, and took a dry powder extinguisher to it (I was very responsible and had one handy before i lit it!). If anyone is in any doubt 2kg of dry powder is much harder to dispose of than 500mL of petrol…

Not petrol but once nearly burnt down the local scout hut making candles.

Heating up the wax before pouring into moulds, someone left it on the heat a bit too long and up it went, the lad carrying it panicked and dropped the pan which then set fire to varnished wooden floor, some bright spark grabbed the water fire extinguisher to put it out which only agitated it and blew the fireball down the entire length of the hut!

Once took the car to a garrage to be serviced.

To get at the air filters on a midget you have to remove the fuel line connecting the two float chambers.

They obviously didn’t put the clip back on.

Next day driving down the road the engine splutters, hmmmmmm.

Assuming it’s just cold I ease the throttle on and apply more choke.

About 30seconds later the footwell (pedal box it above the carbs and drains into footwell) gets a big slosh of petrol!

Somehow it didn’t ignite, despite probably 2 gallons of the stuff getting out and dripping all over the electrics and exhaust pipe!

Retired to a safe distance and let it evaporate.

In the garage one winter night, working on the motorbike. I had half a plastic can of petrol on the floor, kept tripping over it so eventually just kicked it out of the way… A few minutes later, noticed I was getting cold- I’d kicked the can right in front of my fan heater and it had already swelled up to about twice its normal size.

Not sure what would have happened when if finally melted/burst but I doubt all that hot petrol vapour would have mixed well with the heater!

2 incidents:

1st was about 30yrs ago when I was a petrol pump attendant , the pump services guy had been in to service the pumps whilst it was my shift,
This was one of the few attendant stations still around by then.

Our pumps were manually activated , one lever to reset the counter, and a big lever to turn the pump on, then at the nozzle we still had the option to lock the pump on full when you let go.
The pump services wally had been testing the pump, and had left the nozzle set on full with the trigger locked… as when he did the test he
put the pump on and put the nozzle directly back into the main tank…

So the next customer arrived , parked by the pump, and I grabbed the handle of the nozzle and switched the pump on, normally I would then put the nozzle into the filler neck and squeeze, this time as I swung round the pump was on full and I sprayed the occupants of the car with 4* through the open windows as it was summer and all the windows were open.
Poor family were on way to airport for holidays, we were so lucky there was no spark from the interior light switches or anything else, managed to get them out and cleaned up.

2nd was when I picked up a motorbike by taking it apart and chucking it in the car, had fuel tank in front passenger footwell, was a long way and dark/snowing , suddenly noticed that the tank had leaked and I had a footwell full of fuel .. had to stop and mop it out , all the while paranoid about a spark , then drove all the way back with all the windows open 100+ miles dark-snowing miserable night

It’s good to see that I am not alone in my pyro past…

At Scouts (what is it with Scouts and fire?) when I try my magnesium and potassium nitrate flash powder during a field cooking demo. Cue big flash, huge smoke ring and a trip to A&E with charred fingers on one hand.

Of course, there’s always the petrol on bonfire story (the eyebrows grew back), but the best one was the weedkiller and icing sugar experiment. Who would have thought that explosions could smell like toffee?

scouts was great
saw petrol fireballs on several occasions including several foil wrapped spuds being blasted through the air.
funniest was a scout leaders cigarette lighter spontaneously combusting in his jacket pocket because he was too close to the fire he couldn’t get his jacket off quick enough!
not so funny was carrying a younger scout down to the leaders hut after he’d melted a plastic piping onto his shell suit fusing it all to his leg. he had some nasty scars

LOL @ finishthat, I can relate to it!
I used to have a filling station some years ago & at about 2 oclock one morning there was a furious banging on the back door of my house which was attached to the garage with a bloke shouting & screaming that the place was on fire, I went outside to see some flickering flames at the bottom end of the forecourt & grabbed a fire distinguisher. What had happened was that 2 cars had been racing/road raging & one of them had careered off the road, through my place & cleaned out the 4star pump, taking it clean out & launching it down the site, it was on fire alright but just a few ickle flames which were speedily extinguished by me.
So, contrary to popular belief, when a car crashes into a petrol station, it doesn’t explode like in the films!

Can remember a few interesting moments.
One was playing about near an old air raid shelter.
We had about a litre of petrol, so filled up a milk bottle then poured the rest on the floor in the shelter. Then chucked the petrol bomb lit in the door, the resulting fireball made it about 6ft out the door.

Another one – Scout trip (yep like so many others) we had a load of lighter gas, fluid etc. We found an old barn with some hay in it, so got a good handful and took it outside (sensible thinking no?) put it next to a wall which I sat on and proceeded to spray a huge amount of gas and fluid on the hay. Then still in my seated position above the hay i bend down and light it. To this day all I can remember is a flash and the world going very bright yellow and a nasty smell of burning hair.

Shooting fireworks out of scaffolding tubes was good too (like a bazooka, or so we thought), only problem being that if you use a rocket that fires sparks out the back your world goes all sparkly and nasty smelling once the rocket exits the scaffolding.

To be honest so many to list, and I laugh now at all of them, but i think I used up a fair few of my lives

a fire distinguisher.

Distinguishes between petrol fires, electrical fires, gas fires…

Sounds like an ace piece of kit.

What’;s with all the double posts today?

A tin of WD40 on a bonfire then climbed up a tree (that overhung the fire we made) so we could watch it explode. The exploding tin *just* missed my head as it flew by.

When I was a boy, me and a few mates used to go camping in the countryside around our village. One weekend we were struggling to get our little camp fire alight, so one of my mates decided some
petrol would do the trick (not sure why we had the petrol). Anyhoo…as he was pouring petrol from a jerrycan onto the various hay bales and tyres we’d found he managed to set fire to the can. He panicked and threw it behind him…right through the doorway into our tent.

Stayed at our mates house instead.

Northwind – Member
In the garage one winter night, working on the motorbike. I had half a plastic can of petrol on the floor, kept tripping over it so eventually just kicked it out of the way… A few minutes later, noticed I was getting cold- I’d kicked the can right in front of my fan heater and it had already swelled up to about twice its normal size.

Not sure what would have happened when if finally melted/burst but I doubt all that hot petrol vapour would have mixed well with the heater!

Out of the lot this one scares me. I think its what they call a BLEVE, I saw a video of one when on lifeboat crew training

Out in a friend’s boat years ago. After drifing around for a couple of hours, smoking some er, catnip, tried to start the boat and no luck.
My friend had a can of compressed ignition “helper” (can’t think of what it is called), so I manned the ignition key and he proceeded to spray about half a can of the stuff into both carburators (sp?)and I hit the switch–my fried hit the water about 10 feet off the side, minus eyebows, eyelashes and the hair on the front half of his head. Wished I would have had a picture as he was launched and the 15 foot tall jet of flame from each carb.

I don’t think it could have bleve’d, but yep, something along those lines. Not clever at all.

I confess to not knowing what a bleve was. Wow! That’s scary.

1 MIN 20SEC IN!

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl-JgyQA7u0[/video]

No petrol involved, but I used to hammer nails into .5″ rounds. Why am I still alive?

When I was a student sharing a house with a couple of mates, we decided one bonfire night – after a few beverages – to set fire to the old couch which was decorating the back garden. It started off ok, but wasn’t the roaring blaze we’d anticipated, even with the addition of a few bits of wood that were lying about.

So one friend went to his car and got the emergency petrol from his boot (his fuel gauge didn’t work so he kept some spare in case he ran out). We all (sensibly, somehow) chickened out of pouring it on straight from the red plastic can, so he decided to fill a coffee mug and throw/flick it onto the fire using that.

What followed was less ‘throw’ and more ‘pour’. The flames raced up the column of petrol between the couch and the mug, and lit the petrol still in the mug (most of the mug full). My mate stared at the mug, going ‘AAAAAAAARGH’. He then looked at us, and said ‘AAAAARGH’, we responded in a not dissimilar fashion, then he decided to get rid of the mug, which by now had a six-foot column of flame coming out of the top. This time, however, he managed to perfect the flick/throw which had previously eluded him. Straight at the house. Half of the side of the (rented) house was suddenly on fire… luckily it burned off within a few seconds, but for a second there we were wondering how we were going to explain this to the landlord…

This is brill bringing back wonderfull memorys of my youth can still here those immortal lines “i wonder what will happen if”

Not petrol related, but did cost me a job.
It was my first morning in a cheap flat, in a new town, in a new country. I was excited about a job interview I had that day, as the agency had told me I was a very good match and that there were no other candidates available as quickly as I was.
While exploring my new kitchen, I tried to light the ancient gas oven by waving several matches over the slit at the back. It wasn’t until I was blown backwards accross the kitchen in a ball of flame that I learnt that this oven was meant to be lit at the little hole at the front.
I remember thinking how stupid I’d look, managing to blow myself up within 24 hours of emigrating. But the flames just went out after a couple of seconds.
No idea how there was no real damage done. No eyebrows, arm hair all gone and my nose was red and angry looing for a few days. It was one time that having a stiff drink at 10am seemed entirely reasonable.
Got lost on the way to the interview and arrived late, no eyebrows, smelling of whisky, still trembling slightly and with a big red nose. Didn’t get the job.

When they were constructing the local bypass my cousin and I went over to the construction site on the night and filled an empty 55 gallon metal barrel with anything we could get our hands on, hair spray, meths, deodorant and a camping stove canister. We filled it with toilet roll and news paper, lite the blue touch paper and ran like ****. Minutes later nothing so we decided to take a closer look, as we approached ground zero there was green flames licking over the top of the barrel and then BOOOOM.!!! We were still a good 20m away so in no real danger! but the amount of local wildlife it cleared out of the trees was impressive, just the sound of thousands of birds taking to the sky in the middle of the night will stay with me for a long time.

😯

Not petrol but paraffin….. my brother and I used to do fire-breathing and one day we were round at the flat of this girl we were trying to impress. Next door to her was a Chinese restaurant, which had its kitchen upstairs. We went out into her back ginnel and decided to do a double blast against the brick wall. At the top of the wall was the Chinese kitchen window, which was top pivoting and propped wide open. Inside we could hear the sizzling of woks and merry chatter of Chinese voices. We duly lined up, filled up, lit up and let rip…. well about 100 CCs of paraffin well vaporised and burning in a second generates a fair amount of heat, which rises fast and a massive fireball of orange flames and black smoke rose straight up the wall, in the open window and rolled like an orange wave across the restaurant ceiling. The happy chatter stopped for a micro-second then turned to screams and three or four faces appeared at the window, though we only got a fleeting impression because by then we were legging it as fast as we could manage down the street while trying not to wet ourselves laughing. Happy days.

This is bringing back memories of balancing found blank rifle rounds on lit hexy blocks and taking cover…

I forwarded this page to a friend of mine who is a fellow backyard ballistics connoisseur. This was his reply,

When we first got the allotment it was waist high in grasses, I chopped it down with a petrol strimmer which took ages – I was strimming for about 4 hours by the time I had got it all chopped down. The grass then needed picking up and loading into a barrow and wheeling about 100 yards down some winding paths to the compost heap. I did about 3 barrows before getting knackered and spying the nearly fully 2 gallon can of unleaded for the strimmer. A cunning plan immediately formed to sprinkle a little petrol across all the very dry grass and then throw a lit rag on it from a distance.

All I can really say is than when you watch movies and a car petrol tank goes up with a whoomp! its really like that.

As a student I worked as a short order cook at Bell’s Diner in Edinburgh. My brother waited tables. It was run by some hippies, so maintenance and hygene were low priorities. They were too stoned to notice.

On a busy Saturday afternoon with someone ordered the barbeque chicken. The cooking process involved halving a chicken, deep frying it for a minute then coating it in a bbq sauce and finishing it off over a gas fired charcoal grill.

Quickly removing the chicken but failing to shake off all of the boiling fat, when I transferred it to the grill the fat ignited and sent a fireball up into the extractor fan canopy. It had collected grease and oil over the years and had been heated to ignition temperature. When the fireball rose, it set the oil on fire for a horrible second or two an inferno raged.

By the third second we were looking for the fire extinguisher, thankfully it worked, but a powder extinguisher makes a hell of a mess.

The diners heard the shouts from the kitchen and poked their heads in. Surprisingly they stayed until we got cleared up and got cooking again.

I still dont know how we had the presence of mind to go for the extinguisher rather than run. We were like two Basil Fawltys trying to put it out.

when i was based in the Falklands i was sent to a isolated harbour (cant remember the name…it was 2 hour drive from MPA on the goose green road. for you that have been there)

any way…. there was 2 of us and we had run out of gas and hexi blocks as we had been there for 2 week and was only kitted up for a week stay.

we had some petrol and decided to decanter it to our “multi fuel” burner but spilt some on the floor (not much) any way we decided to light up and cook some muscles we had scavenged and a fish we caught.

we lit the burner and BOOM our room went up! me and my oppo just looked at each other for about 5 seconds before stamping the thing out! 3 day later we had had enough! phoned our mate back in MPA he managed to “borrow” a Land rover and came to rescue us at midnight! all because of snow!!

Years ago, before I was wise, I was attempting to light a woodburning stove. Unfortunately all the wood was wet, so I had the brainwave of throwing in some petrol (I had only ever had fun experiences with petrol up to this point).
After pouring in 1/2 litre of petrol, staying low, I gingerly held in a lit match at arms length.
I was literally thrown across the room by the force of the explosion, the room filled up with soot and there were huge flames coming from the chimney. It wasn’t even my house.
You live and learn. 🙂

i was riding at the scott trial a number of years ago when one of the marshalls spilt a small amount of petrol on my nylon /lycra riding jeans, ten minutes across the moors reving my bike and having a hefty dab i suddenly saw a flash ,ended up with 1st degree burns round my groin area and on my leg.somehow got to the finnish but out of time.
did’nt go to hospital for a couple of days as my dad reffered to it as just a scratch.
another day somebody unknown to us had pulled the fuel pipe off his yamaha fise and switched the fuel on ,he jumped on his bike started it ,to be engulfed in flames .i ran and pulled him off the bike and it fell on the floor ,the daft sod ran back in the flames and turned the fuel off probably saving the bike…he still has it to this day.