Another story you may have missed

[Rheged]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-56337761

Smoking driver using air freshener blows up car in Wrexham.

[zenrat]

"No one was injured"?

Given the damage to the car I would have thought the driver was injured.  Or are Audi now making their cars from tin foil?

[PR19_Kit]

I'm not sure that car designers ever take THAT sort of stupidity into account during the design process! It's certainly totalled the car!

[Old Wombat]

The usual process is;

1. Smoke cigarette
2. Deodorise with air freshener

Best option is not to smoke (in your car).

[Rheged]

The usual process is;

1. Smoke cigarette
2. Deodorise with air freshener

Best option is not to smoke (in your car).

What with putting colour film in a camera, diesel in my half share of a Landrover and port and lemons in a girlfriend; I couldn't afford to start smoking!!

[Old Wombat]

Unfortunately I do smoke (again & still ) but I don't smoke in my house or, except in exceptional circumstances, my car.

[scooter]

Darwin Award...

[kerick]

Amazing how the glass is completely gone, I couldn't even see any on the ground around the car! I would hate to be standing anywhere near that car.

[Flyer]

Unfortunately I do smoke (again & still ) but I don't smoke in my house or, except in exceptional circumstances, my car.

Ditto

[The Rat]

There have been cases of people surviving relatively unscathed amid the ruins of a home detroyed by a propane explosion. It happens too quickly to set them on fire, it just blows up the walls, sends the roof into low earth orbit, and frightens the cat. The flame propagates so fast that it uses up all the oxygen in the immediate area, and snuffs itself out. Sort of like the use of a big barrel of nitro-glycerine to put out an oil well fire.

[scooter]

There have been cases of people surviving relatively unscathed amid the ruins of a home detroyed by a propane explosion. It happens too quickly to set them on fire, it just blows up the walls, sends the roof into low earth orbit, and frightens the cat. The flame propagates so fast that it uses up all the oxygen in the immediate area, and snuffs itself out. Sort of like the use of a big barrel of nitro-glycerine to put out an oil well fire.

True story, that happened now about 30 or so years ago.  I'm at home watching tv (Dr Who or ST:TOS, courtesy of the PBS station from Scranton-Wilkes Barre PA on cable); on a weekend night when our house suddenly shakes.  Come to find out later, a house on the *other* side of town blew itself to smithereens.  Or, rather, the Vietnam vet that lived there with his elderly mother did.  Origin of the blast was in the basement; he survived, his mother didn't.  And a quick kata of Google-Fu found the NYT article. (Copy-pasta below)

An explosion in the basement of a house in Cresskill, N.J., where the authorities found weapons and ammunition, killed an 83-year-old woman yesterday and injured her grandson and another family member.

The acting Bergen County Prosecutor, John G. Holl, said the cause of the blast in the house at 179 Broadway, on the Tenafly border, was not known.

He said the victim, Mary E. Ryan, was asleep in a second-floor bedroom when the blast rocked the neighborhood, leveling the house, damaging houses on either side of it and raining debris a block away. Mrs. Ryan was pronounced dead at 5 A.M., four hours after the blast and the three-alarm fire that followed it.

Mr. Holl said Mrs. Ryan's grandson, Richard Taylor, 40, was awake and in the basement when the explosion ripped through the house at 1:20 A.M.

Door Blown Off Its Hinges

But Mr. Holl refused to say whether Mr. Taylor had been doing anything that might have led to the explosion, which blew the heavy basement door off its hinges and sent it flying 200 feet. Investigators found the door on Linwood Street, a block from the house, Mr. Holl said.

Mr. Taylor suffered third-degree burns on his hands and a burn on the left side of his face. He was taken to Englewood Hospital, where he was in guarded condition last night, officials there said.

Mr. Taylor's mother, whom Mr. Holl identified as Wilhmena, 62, was sleeping in a bedroom down the hall from Mrs. Ryan, but escaped with minor injuries.

A next-door neighbor, Robert Bogert, said that the windows in his house were blown out and that the outside walls were scorched by the explosion.

'The House Was Gone'

''Everything shook,'' said Mr. Bogert, who said he was in his kitchen at the time. ''I thought my daughter had run into the house with the car.''

''I looked out the window and the house was gone,'' he said, referring to Mr. Taylor's house.

Mr. Holl said there was no evidence that the explosion had been caused by a bomb, but investigators were checking reports that neighbors had smelled gunpowder at the time of the blast. Mr. Holl said investigators were also checking reports that Mr. Taylor was a Vietnam veteran who had worked as a demolition specialist.

Mr. Holl said investigators found two 20-pound tanks of propane gas in the basement, along with a shotgun, a .50-caliber rifle, several handguns, a nonworking hand grenade and ''hundreds of rounds of different kinds of ammunition.''

A version of this article appears in print on March 4, 1990, Section 1, Page 29 of the National edition with the headline: New Jersey Blast Kills a Woman; Police Find a Weapons Stockpile. [/quote