News

<p>Firefighters are the true MVPs, spending their lives saving lives and homes and generally making the world a safer place. While the job requires extensive physical training, it also requires a lot of emotional strength to stay calm in deeply stressful situations, and provide comfort for families who are on the verge of losing everything.</p><p>That said, while the job itself is serious by nature, there can still be some absurd, bizarre, and downright funny stories - particularly when it comes to the ways people set fires.</p><h2>In <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bhr1j8/firefighters_of_reddit_whats_the_most_bizarre/" target="_blank">a popular Reddit thread</a>, firefighters shared the most bizarre cause of a fire they&#39;ve ever seen.</h2><h2>1. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/OhNoTheGround/">OhNoTheGround</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Back In 2011, there was a fire in Croatia and I was sent out to stop it with a team. The cause of the fire was a cat...the cat turned on a stove. Don&#39;t ask me how.</p> </blockquote><h2>2. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/lick-a-lemon/">lick-a-lemon</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I work in student accommodation. Students manage to start about 3 fires a year (mostly by leaving cooking unattended and then forgetting about it), and it&#39;s my job to fix things afterwards. They&#39;re more stupid than bizarre, but here&#39;s some highlights and some top tips for annoying the fire brigade:</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>If you would like to grow some weed in your wardrobe, make sure your designer shirts are hanging above the really hot lamps you&#39;re using. It&#39;ll catch fire while you&#39;re sleeping and fill your room with weed smoke. For bonus points, set yourself on fire while trying to put it out. Double bonus points: Deny all knowledge of this to the fire brigade - while you are obviously high, reek of weed and burning plastic, and have clearly been on fire recently.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>If you&#39;ve decided candles are a fun thing to play with, do this indoors next to a big stack of paper towels. They absorb molten wax really well, but you might also end up with too much fire. If you&#39;ve had enough, you can dispose of excess fire in the recycling bin.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Flaming shots are a great way to liven up your party! Make sure you try to light them when you are already pissed as newts and have spilled vodka all over the kitchen table. You&#39;ll be doing this indoors, because of course you f*cking will.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>The university has banned fireworks on campus, but you can make your own by microwaving a variety of interesting things. Coconuts explode so violently they&#39;ll destroy the microwave <em>and</em> the nearby cupboards! Bonus points: have your boyfriend get mad and try to fight the bomb squad who are here to investigate the explosion.</p> <p>All these things happened over the 7 years I worked in various buildings. There&#39;s probably more, but I&#39;ll have to try and jog my memory a bit!</p> </blockquote><h2>3. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/fireinvestigator113/">fireinvestigator113</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Oooo I can answer this. Recently I had a fire that I investigated.</p> <p>The only fire damage in the second-floor bedroom is in a single joist space in the floor. The carpet, padding, and subfloor were completely consumed, perfectly along the joists on either side.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Elsewhere in this room, a laptop battery exploded.</p> <p>There is no opening in the floor to the joist space that burned. The only explanation I have is that there was a gas leak into that joist space, and enough of the ambient gas leaked into the room and the battery failed igniting the gas which traveled through the HVAC system to the joist space where it actively burned.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>Problems with this - it is f**king ridiculous to have <em>two</em> failures occur at essentially the same time. There&#39;s no fire damage in the bedroom, only heat damage. The gas line that ran through this area was only on one end of the joist space and was a solid steel pipe, there were no joints. There were also no holes I could find.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Also, I am hardpressed to believe that a single cell of a lithium battery has enough energy to ricochet off of a wall and penetrate through carpet, padding, and subfloor.</p> <p>So that&#39;s my weirdest cause.</p> </blockquote><h2>4. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/symbiosa/">symbiosa</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>In California during the 80s there was a series of fires and a skilled fire investigator was hired to find the culprit. It turned out that he was the <a href="https://www.californiasun.co/stories/a-california-arson-investigator-was-regarded-as-a-sage-but-it-was-him-all-along/" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" target="_blank">arsonist all along.</a></p> </blockquote><h2>5. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/donutmcownage/">donutmcownage</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>My Father was (retired) a firefighter in London, He once phoned me just to tell me about a job he had just been to. He told me that He had just been to a fire in a sex dungeon and that, The fire had been started when the woman was trying to burn the man&#39;s chest hair off with a candle, then proceed to drop the candle onto the fur rug when hot wax burnt her. I laughed and he said &quot;You&#39;ll be sick in a second&quot;, he then proceeded to tell me the couple were in their very late seventies.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>6. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/kronos36/">kronos36</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I&#39;m not a fire fighter; however, the fire station in my hometown burned down. People started calling the fire station telling them it was on fire, and they didn&#39;t believe it until they finally walked outside and looked. They had just enough time to get the fire engines and a few things out before it got too bad. It ended up burning to the ground and they had a new one built.</p> </blockquote><h2>7. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/braketd/">braketd</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Back when I worked EMS, I ran a medical call with a very difficult patient. The patient refused any care or transport, I did paperwork for a refusal and gave the patient a copy. The patient then &quot; what the f*ck am I supposed to do with this paper?&quot; I said &quot; burn it for all I care.&quot; Ten minutes later I&#39;m back en route to that address for a structure fire.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>8. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Yoboi322/">Yoboi322</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Not a firefighter but my father was.</p> <p>One day he got called to a house fire on the outskirts of town. Upon arrival, the whole house was engulfed in flames. However, the owner of the house (an older lady) desperately wanted to run back in and get her belongings. They had to restrain her.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>After the flames were put out my father went through the rubble to hopefully find some of her belongings.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Right in the middle of the house, he found leftovers of a book, dolls, mason jars of oil, and sand. Then it clicked this lady was doing black magic. The lady&#39;s breath smelled like pure gasoline. She was doing an old ritual of spitting flammable liquids onto whatever she was casting a spell on. It&#39;s done with oil usually but I guess this lady didn&#39;t have the funds or brains so she settled with gasoline which she spat put onto the dolls that what my dad assumes was surrounded by candles.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>Yup, a lady lit up her house by spitting out gasoline in the name of black magic. Because why not.</p> </blockquote><h2>9. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/NorthernBuffalo/">NorthernBuffalo</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Actual Fire Fighter here.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>Years ago during my training, a guy parked his work van in a parking lot, threw a chain he had from the cab into the back, and went inside the store. Each end of the chain happened to land on battery posts still hooked up to some machinery inside the van. It sparked and melted the tarp it was on, and shortly the whole van was up in flames. Pretty crazy odds.</p> </blockquote><h2>10. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/CrazyIslander/">CrazyIslander</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>We had two separate fires in a year that were caused by the sun shining through a window, through an object and causing the magnifying-glass effect.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>One was a glass paperweight sitting on top of a stack of papers. It burned a hole straight through the stack, down to the desk. It was wild.</p> <p>The other one escapes me at the moment...might&rsquo;ve been the sun shining through a glass bottle or something my if memory serves me correctly.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>Either way, it&rsquo;s relatively bizarre to get a call like that, let alone two...and both were fairly close to one another.</p> <p>Even more ironic, a friend of mine had this happen in his own home the same year...the sun was shining on a Santa Clause figurine and the fabric robe caught fire.</p> </blockquote><h2>11. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/tonks118/">tonks118</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p><em>Obligatory not a firefighter.</em></p> <p>My brother was 14 and tended to...well wander off. He was the survivalist type. Would go hunting, fishing, or camping in the woods and fields by our house quite often, always alone, and no one thought anything of it.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>One day he managed to burn down two fields and some trees of a nearby wood even caught before the fire department got out there and got it contained. No one was hurt, all was well in the end because our parents were the only ones to suffer any property damage as he always stayed on their land. My parents were PISSED, they originally thought he had been sneaking off to smoke, and they were ready to rip him a new one.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>Turns out he was trying to make napalm and was (sort of) successful.</p> <p>He is now infamous in our small town and has gone on to have a stellar military career, at least until he was injured in Afghanistan.</p> <p>Didn&rsquo;t get into trouble for napalm, but would have for cigarettes. Gotta love small towns.</p> <p>He is now in charge of fireworks every year. Because why the hell not.</p> </blockquote><h2>12. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/wasimohee/">wasimohee</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>There was a rash of fires in my area. After years they clued in that it had to be arson. After burning several hundred acres and evacuating a nearby town, the arsonist finally made a mistake. The arson investigators found his ignition device, which involved a cigarette that usually burnt up in the blaze. But a single cigarette doesn&#39;t prove anything.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>However, the fire marshal got a gut feeling about it and decided to hit up the nearest gas station CCTV footage an hour prior to the blaze. To his surprise, he saw a local highway patrolman that was also a former fire department chief. The patrolman, who was also deeply religious and didn&#39;t smoke, bought a pack of cigarettes and left.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><blockquote> <p>The fire marshal contacted highway patrol and they examined the GPS coordinates of the patrolman at the time of the fire, and guess where he was. To bring him in quietly they decided to have someone who he trusted request an interview in front of a camera in the county building where he&#39;d be required to surrender his gun before entering. The trusted man they selected was the fire marshal himself, as they had fought fire together for years.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>The patrolman surrendered his gun willingly and entered the interview with the fire marshal, who proceeded to show him the evidence they had against him. Fortunately, the patrolman confessed to everything and surrendered, and has cooperated with authorities since.</p> </blockquote><h2>13. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/SherlockHG221b/">SherlockHG221b</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>I&#39;m not a firefighter but we have a lot of fires in the city I live in. I think the dumbest one yet, was when a guy tried casting his own sword in his house. I repeat, HE TRIED CASTING A SWORD IN HIS HOUSE. (He lived on the most flammable street in the city, there&#39;s been a lot of fires on that street. Also, this particular Fire was all over the global news.)</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>14. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/a_penguin/">a_penguin</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Went to a fire where the cause was from a construction staple used to hold wiring in place was accidentally driven through the wire to a smoke detector.</p> <p>The house was nearly finished but no one had moved in yet thankfully. Just seemed ironic to me.</p> </blockquote><h2>15. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/cbelt3/">cbelt3</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>8th-grade model Rocketry club. And the big &ldquo;D&rdquo; engine rocket suffered a fin failure at launch. And went sideways 100 yards into a huge pine tree. A nice pine tree with a lot of dead lower branches. Dry branches. And then the parachute squib fired. And those branches went up like a damn bomb.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>That tree was a volcano of fire 30 meters high in less than a minute. And the rest of the forest next to the school went up. Teachers went running with hoses and fire extinguishers, and the fire department showed up and finally contained it.</p> <p>And that&rsquo;s how the model rocket club was cancelled for all time.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>16. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Perseos_/">Perseos_</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>A friend of mine told me about a call his dad (firefighter) went on:</p> <p>A man managed to get a bunch of room phone numbers at a hotel. He called everyone on the 2nd floor and told them that there was a bedbug infestation and that they needed to take their mattresses and bedding out into the hallway. He then called a room on the 3rd floor, and a (drunk) lady answered. He explained to her that there was a gas leak and told her to get rid of all electronics. So she proceeded to defenestrate any and all electronic appliances and devices. Threw her phone out too. She even managed to remove a large TV, which fell from her room to the ground below, cracking the pavement and opening a gas line. This was why the fire department was called in.</p> </blockquote><h2>17. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Slingblademotor/">Slingblademotor</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Firefighter for 10 years. Guy was refueling a large storage tank from a tanker truck. He was supposed to turn off the truck while pumping but he didn&rsquo;t. He over-filled storage tank. Gas fumes got sucked into Diesel engine and ignited. Kaboom! Worst fire I ever went to. Thought I was dead for sure when the tanker blew up in front of us.</p> <p><a href="https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.staugustine.com/article/20120221/NEWS/302219967%3ftemplate=ampart" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" target="_blank">https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.staugustine.com/article/20120221/NEWS/302219967%3ftemplate=ampart</a></p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>18. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/udo0071/">udo0071</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Fire chief here: a guy left his house with his wife to a party. Came back alone to his house because he forgot something. Picked up several petrol canisters from the garage and poured it all over the house. He wanted to scam the insurance because the debt was too high and he cannot pay it anymore. He wanted to burn down the house slowly and returning to his wife to the party.</p> </blockquote><blockquote> <p>The moment he lit the match a huge explosion occurred witch destroyed all windows immediately and most of the surrounding area. Got some serious burns and the whole street smelled like a petrol station blew up. Two people inside the house on the upper floor in a different apartment were injured too, so he was sentenced to jail also for attempted murder, because he knew they were inside.</p> </blockquote><h2>19. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Truth_bombs_incoming/">Truth_bombs_incoming</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>Man kept pig fenced in behind house. Propane tank line was buried about 4&quot; underground where pig was. Pig piss and sh*t made a brass fitting in propane line brittle. It broke, leaked propane, it pooled against house, some went inside, got ignited by a heater, burned house.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div><h2>20. From <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/Mzungu1302/">Mzungu1302</a>:</h2><blockquote> <p>We had a fire on a desktop a few months ago and there wasn&#39;t anything plugged into the outlet. The old man who moved there recently had set up his desk, and put a magnifying glass in his cupholder in front of the window! The sun came through the window, magnified onto his daily diary/journal and started the fire! Took us a bit to figure that one out.</p> </blockquote><div className="ad-splitter"></div>

20 firefighters share the dumbest and most bizarre ways people have caused fires.

Firefighters are the true MVPs, spending their lives saving lives and homes and generally making the world a safer place. While the job requires extensive physical training, it also requires a lot of emotional strength to stay calm in deeply stressful situations, and provide comfort for families who are on the verge of losing everything.That said, while the job itself is serious by nature, there can still be some absurd, bizarre, and downright funny stories - particularly when it comes to the ways people set fires.In a popular Reddit thread, firefighters shared the most bizarre cause of a fire they&#39;ve ever seen.1. From OhNoTheGround: Back In 2011, there was a fire in Croatia and I was sent out to stop it with a team. The cause of the fire was a cat...the cat turned on a stove. Don&#39;t ask me how. 2. From lick-a-lemon: I work in student accommodation. Students manage to start about 3 fires a year (mostly by leaving cooking unattended and then forgetting about it), and it&#39;s my job to fix things afterwards. They&#39;re more stupid than bizarre, but here&#39;s some highlights and some top tips for annoying the fire brigade:  If you would like to grow some weed in your wardrobe, make sure your designer shirts are hanging above the really hot lamps you&#39;re using. It&#39;ll catch fire while you&#39;re sleeping and fill your room with weed smoke. For bonus points, set yourself on fire while trying to put it out. Double bonus points: Deny all knowledge of this to the fire brigade - while you are obviously high, reek of weed and burning plastic, and have clearly been on fire recently.  If you&#39;ve decided candles are a fun thing to play with, do this indoors next to a big stack of paper towels. They absorb molten wax really well, but you might also end up with too much fire. If you&#39;ve had enough, you can dispose of excess fire in the recycling bin.  Flaming shots are a great way to liven up your party! Make sure you try to light them when you are already pissed as newts and have spilled vodka all over the kitchen table. You&#39;ll be doing this indoors, because of course you f*cking will.  The university has banned fireworks on campus, but you can make your own by microwaving a variety of interesting things. Coconuts explode so violently they&#39;ll destroy the microwave and the nearby cupboards! Bonus points: have your boyfriend get mad and try to fight the bomb squad who are here to investigate the explosion. All these things happened over the 7 years I worked in various buildings. There&#39;s probably more, but I&#39;ll have to try and jog my memory a bit! 3. From fireinvestigator113: Oooo I can answer this. Recently I had a fire that I investigated. The only fire damage in the second-floor bedroom is in a single joist space in the floor. The carpet, padding, and subfloor were completely consumed, perfectly along the joists on either side.  Elsewhere in this room, a laptop battery exploded. There is no opening in the floor to the joist space that burned. The only explanation I have is that there was a gas leak into that joist space, and enough of the ambient gas leaked into the room and the battery failed igniting the gas which traveled through the HVAC system to the joist space where it actively burned.  Problems with this - it is f**king ridiculous to have two failures occur at essentially the same time. There&#39;s no fire damage in the bedroom, only heat damage. The gas line that ran through this area was only on one end of the joist space and was a solid steel pipe, there were no joints. There were also no holes I could find.  Also, I am hardpressed to believe that a single cell of a lithium battery has enough energy to ricochet off of a wall and penetrate through carpet, padding, and subfloor. So that&#39;s my weirdest cause. 4. From symbiosa: In California during the 80s there was a series of fires and a skilled fire investigator was hired to find the culprit. It turned out that he was the arsonist all along. 5. From donutmcownage: My Father was (retired) a firefighter in London, He once phoned me just to tell me about a job he had just been to. He told me that He had just been to a fire in a sex dungeon and that, The fire had been started when the woman was trying to burn the man&#39;s chest hair off with a candle, then proceed to drop the candle onto the fur rug when hot wax burnt her. I laughed and he said &quot;You&#39;ll be sick in a second&quot;, he then proceeded to tell me the couple were in their very late seventies. 6. From kronos36: I&#39;m not a fire fighter; however, the fire station in my hometown burned down. People started calling the fire station telling them it was on fire, and they didn&#39;t believe it until they finally walked outside and looked. They had just enough time to get the fire engines and a few things out before it got too bad. It ended up burning to the ground and they had a new one built. 7. From braketd: Back when I worked EMS, I ran a medical call with a very difficult patient. The patient refused any care or transport, I did paperwork for a refusal and gave the patient a copy. The patient then &quot; what the f*ck am I supposed to do with this paper?&quot; I said &quot; burn it for all I care.&quot; Ten minutes later I&#39;m back en route to that address for a structure fire. 8. From Yoboi322: Not a firefighter but my father was. One day he got called to a house fire on the outskirts of town. Upon arrival, the whole house was engulfed in flames. However, the owner of the house (an older lady) desperately wanted to run back in and get her belongings. They had to restrain her.  After the flames were put out my father went through the rubble to hopefully find some of her belongings.  Right in the middle of the house, he found leftovers of a book, dolls, mason jars of oil, and sand. Then it clicked this lady was doing black magic. The lady&#39;s breath smelled like pure gasoline. She was doing an old ritual of spitting flammable liquids onto whatever she was casting a spell on. It&#39;s done with oil usually but I guess this lady didn&#39;t have the funds or brains so she settled with gasoline which she spat put onto the dolls that what my dad assumes was surrounded by candles.  Yup, a lady lit up her house by spitting out gasoline in the name of black magic. Because why not. 9. From NorthernBuffalo: Actual Fire Fighter here.  Years ago during my training, a guy parked his work van in a parking lot, threw a chain he had from the cab into the back, and went inside the store. Each end of the chain happened to land on battery posts still hooked up to some machinery inside the van. It sparked and melted the tarp it was on, and shortly the whole van was up in flames. Pretty crazy odds. 10. From CrazyIslander: We had two separate fires in a year that were caused by the sun shining through a window, through an object and causing the magnifying-glass effect.  One was a glass paperweight sitting on top of a stack of papers. It burned a hole straight through the stack, down to the desk. It was wild. The other one escapes me at the moment...might&rsquo;ve been the sun shining through a glass bottle or something my if memory serves me correctly.  Either way, it&rsquo;s relatively bizarre to get a call like that, let alone two...and both were fairly close to one another. Even more ironic, a friend of mine had this happen in his own home the same year...the sun was shining on a Santa Clause figurine and the fabric robe caught fire. 11. From tonks118: Obligatory not a firefighter. My brother was 14 and tended to...well wander off. He was the survivalist type. Would go hunting, fishing, or camping in the woods and fields by our house quite often, always alone, and no one thought anything of it.  One day he managed to burn down two fields and some trees of a nearby wood even caught before the fire department got out there and got it contained. No one was hurt, all was well in the end because our parents were the only ones to suffer any property damage as he always stayed on their land. My parents were PISSED, they originally thought he had been sneaking off to smoke, and they were ready to rip him a new one.  Turns out he was trying to make napalm and was (sort of) successful. He is now infamous in our small town and has gone on to have a stellar military career, at least until he was injured in Afghanistan. Didn&rsquo;t get into trouble for napalm, but would have for cigarettes. Gotta love small towns. He is now in charge of fireworks every year. Because why the hell not. 12. From wasimohee: There was a rash of fires in my area. After years they clued in that it had to be arson. After burning several hundred acres and evacuating a nearby town, the arsonist finally made a mistake. The arson investigators found his ignition device, which involved a cigarette that usually burnt up in the blaze. But a single cigarette doesn&#39;t prove anything.  However, the fire marshal got a gut feeling about it and decided to hit up the nearest gas station CCTV footage an hour prior to the blaze. To his surprise, he saw a local highway patrolman that was also a former fire department chief. The patrolman, who was also deeply religious and didn&#39;t smoke, bought a pack of cigarettes and left.  The fire marshal contacted highway patrol and they examined the GPS coordinates of the patrolman at the time of the fire, and guess where he was. To bring him in quietly they decided to have someone who he trusted request an interview in front of a camera in the county building where he&#39;d be required to surrender his gun before entering. The trusted man they selected was the fire marshal himself, as they had fought fire together for years.  The patrolman surrendered his gun willingly and entered the interview with the fire marshal, who proceeded to show him the evidence they had against him. Fortunately, the patrolman confessed to everything and surrendered, and has cooperated with authorities since. 13. From SherlockHG221b: I&#39;m not a firefighter but we have a lot of fires in the city I live in. I think the dumbest one yet, was when a guy tried casting his own sword in his house. I repeat, HE TRIED CASTING A SWORD IN HIS HOUSE. (He lived on the most flammable street in the city, there&#39;s been a lot of fires on that street. Also, this particular Fire was all over the global news.) 14. From a_penguin: Went to a fire where the cause was from a construction staple used to hold wiring in place was accidentally driven through the wire to a smoke detector. The house was nearly finished but no one had moved in yet thankfully. Just seemed ironic to me. 15. From cbelt3: 8th-grade model Rocketry club. And the big &ldquo;D&rdquo; engine rocket suffered a fin failure at launch. And went sideways 100 yards into a huge pine tree. A nice pine tree with a lot of dead lower branches. Dry branches. And then the parachute squib fired. And those branches went up like a damn bomb.  That tree was a volcano of fire 30 meters high in less than a minute. And the rest of the forest next to the school went up. Teachers went running with hoses and fire extinguishers, and the fire department showed up and finally contained it. And that&rsquo;s how the model rocket club was cancelled for all time. 16. From Perseos_: A friend of mine told me about a call his dad (firefighter) went on: A man managed to get a bunch of room phone numbers at a hotel. He called everyone on the 2nd floor and told them that there was a bedbug infestation and that they needed to take their mattresses and bedding out into the hallway. He then called a room on the 3rd floor, and a (drunk) lady answered. He explained to her that there was a gas leak and told her to get rid of all electronics. So she proceeded to defenestrate any and all electronic appliances and devices. Threw her phone out too. She even managed to remove a large TV, which fell from her room to the ground below, cracking the pavement and opening a gas line. This was why the fire department was called in. 17. From Slingblademotor: Firefighter for 10 years. Guy was refueling a large storage tank from a tanker truck. He was supposed to turn off the truck while pumping but he didn&rsquo;t. He over-filled storage tank. Gas fumes got sucked into Diesel engine and ignited. Kaboom! Worst fire I ever went to. Thought I was dead for sure when the tanker blew up in front of us. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.staugustine.com/article/20120221/NEWS/302219967%3ftemplate=ampart 18. From udo0071: Fire chief here: a guy left his house with his wife to a party. Came back alone to his house because he forgot something. Picked up several petrol canisters from the garage and poured it all over the house. He wanted to scam the insurance because the debt was too high and he cannot pay it anymore. He wanted to burn down the house slowly and returning to his wife to the party.  The moment he lit the match a huge explosion occurred witch destroyed all windows immediately and most of the surrounding area. Got some serious burns and the whole street smelled like a petrol station blew up. Two people inside the house on the upper floor in a different apartment were injured too, so he was sentenced to jail also for attempted murder, because he knew they were inside. 19. From Truth_bombs_incoming: Man kept pig fenced in behind house. Propane tank line was buried about 4&quot; underground where pig was. Pig piss and sh*t made a brass fitting in propane line brittle. It broke, leaked propane, it pooled against house, some went inside, got ignited by a heater, burned house. 20. From Mzungu1302: We had a fire on a desktop a few months ago and there wasn&#39;t anything plugged into the outlet. The old man who moved there recently had set up his desk, and put a magnifying glass in his cupholder in front of the window! The sun came through the window, magnified onto his daily diary/journal and started the fire! Took us a bit to figure that one out. 