hmmm...strangely enough, two episodes that stand out in my mind both involve fire. :rolleyes: When I was 19 I was taking my old dog Jake (I'd had him since he was a pup and I was 6) to the vet to be put down because I couldn't bear to do it. He was in the seat next to me just lyin there and for some reason I though he looked uncomfortable. I pulled my car off to the side of the road (no shoulder) to adjust him. This was East Texas in summer. I looked up to see smoke billowing from all directions. I slammed the car in gear and drove back onto the road where I looked back to see that my exhaust system had caught the ditch and the adjoining pasture on fire. Wind was blowin good too. 40 acres later it was out. Luckily the owner had been planning to do a burn soon anyway.
Second instance happened in the spring of '98. Nebraska had suffered a huge snowstorm the previous October and we had trees down all over the place. As assistant chief of the local volunteer FD I was helping get rid of brush for the village. We had a huge brush pile that we were going to burn. It was wet due to earlier rains, but we were convinced we could burn it. We started by using diesel as an accelerant. Didn't work so well. So we changed to gasoline. After dowsing a portion of the pile with gas I lit a road flare and tossed it onto the pile thinking the vapors would have disapated more than what they had. Huge mushroom cloud. Huge BOOM. I was thrown back into my chief. No injuries tho. I got home and my wife told me she thought something had hit the house but she couldn't find anything. I didn't bother to tell her it was probably the shockwave from my little incident.
