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Posted: 2/7/2006 6:26:50 AM EDT
A man from Sheridan is facing explosives charges after he accidentally blew up his own car with a gas-filled balloon he was taking to a Super Bowl party. The Arapahoe County Sheriff's Office found a suspicious-looking car Sunday afternoon behind the old Duggan's gas station in the 4500 block of South Santa Fe Drive frontage road. Passersby had called in to report some type of explosion or car accident. When a deputy arrived to check it out, he found a white car that showed obvious signs of an explosion. All the windows were blown out, the vehicle doors were bent towards the outside and the roof was pushed about a foot higher than normal. The deputy traced the license plate to a home in the 3600 block of South Grove Street in Sheridan. Sheridan officers talked to the people inside and a man and a woman admitted that they were in the car. They explained that they were taking a balloon to a Super Bowl party -- a balloon filled with acetylene, a very explosive gas used in welding -- so they could blow up the balloon while celebrating. However, on the drive, the balloon rolled across the back seat, possibly causing static electricity, and igniting the gas, causing it to explode. The couple said a passer-by gave them a ride home. Deputies called in an ambulance, who took the couple to Swedish Medical Center for possible shrapnel wounds and broken eardrums. Norman Frey, 46, faces a charge of possession, use, or removal of explosives or incendiary devices. He faces two to six years in prison. www.thedenverchannel.com/news/6790966/detail.html |
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I bet they have serious hearing damage |
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See that shit coming out of their ears, Slick? They can't hear you. Cool it!
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This is where the law need not apply.
The officers simply need to say, "you dumb fuck, bet you won't do that again now will ya?" Only time the law should get involved in an event like this is if a 3rd party was hurt due to flying glass. |
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Oddly, this has happened more than once. Recall some time ago that someone was killed when they inflated a number of ballons and were filling their car with them. I seem to recall the individual being ejected from the force. Someone with strong google fu could probably find the report.
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A passer-by saw them standing next to their car and decided to give them a lift?
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hypothetical situation involving a garbage bag filled with said gas and a long "fuse" made of TP caused a hypothetical crater about 3 ft in diameter at a construction site. I can't imagine being inside a car with a balloon full going off. I would like to know how much time passed between the blow up and them recovering enough to wander away and seek a ride. There is a reason the DOT has rules about hauling the stuff around and in this case it ain't just to collect taxes.
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No fuck! +1 |
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That must be that new 9mm HE round Glock has been working on. Must be some test pics from the range.
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DAMN! That is a true detonation, considering it was only a few grams of acetylene.
I did stupid shit like that back when I was younger. Filled a plastic milk jug with acetylene and oxygen. Set it off remotely. Denuded a square foot of grass. |
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Why do they need to charge him? I mean if I have a tank of propane do I have "an explosive device" on the way to range. He's a dumbass for sure but the ones hurt were the dumbasses, leave it at that.
I used to fill balloons with hydrogen and others with oxygen I created from water and electricty. When I had enough I'd take it out back and ignite with rocket igniters. Made some pretty good fireballs. Guess I'm a felon too. |
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Funny !!!!!1 |
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It even pooched up the trunk lid!
I cant believe he actually walked away from that! |
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I think a better word to use is stumbled away from that! |
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Had an Agri Teacher pull the same stunt in the shop building , Blowed out all the windows and bowed out the shop doors. Except he did it on purpose, not thinking it would be that explosive he had it on a long string and pulled it over a candle.
Bad idea, but he is now a professor at the U of A |
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LMFAO, my dad is an Ag teacher in Arkansas, and I think I know that guy :P
The crazy stuff that goes on in classrooms here :) I was in high school physics, and my teacher was in the mood to do a demonstration I guess, as it had nothign to do with the course. He had a block of sodium about the size of a deck of card, and he would slice a small sliver off with his nice and drop it into a bucket of water, letting it skim over the top as it oxidized. Anyhow, he had trouble cutting off a sliver, and dropped the whole block in the 5-gallon bucket of water. At this point, I should point out that he was ex-Navy, submariner. He yelled "HIT THE DECK!!" and everyone dropped to the ground. The sodium exploded, and I kid you not EVERY ceiling tile in the lab was destroyed. The bucket was sitting next to a wooden lab station, and the concussion was hard enough to knock the top of it about 4" from where it was, and splintered the supports on bottom. As far as we know, every one was fine, but it was LOUD. The science building was seperate from the others, maybe 20' away, and the only teacher to say anything was the one next door - she just poked her head in and said "Everything alright?". |
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Damn, Heat was a good movie. -BJohnson |
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I live about 5 miles from Sheridan. Having dealt with their PD myself, I'm surprised they didn't tack on speeding and unsafe vehicle to the charges. |
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you mean when the policeman questioned they didn't keep saying
WHAT>?! WHAT?! I CAN'T HEAR SHIT WITH ALL THIS BLOOD COMING OUT OF MY EARS ! |
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Sodium? Are you sure it wasn't Potasium? |
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No, sodium does the same shit, just not with as much vigor as potassium. I too remember seeing a demonstration of sodium in an Arkansas classroom. As I remember the instructor put up a sheild around the container and little blue sparks shot out of the water. He also told a story of some guys that stole some sodium from the chemistry room, wrapped it in toliet paper, and then flushed it. It made it a few feet down the pipe befire it exploded. Guess whose families got to pay to dig up the floor and repair the pipe?
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Almost exactly the same thing happened at my old small-town high school a few years after I graduated. The coach / chemistry teacher thought it'd be fun to throw sodium in a sink full of water. Nobody was wearing safety glasses. It blew the lab to smithereens. School officials ended up padlocking the door until the building was torn down years later. My brother was in the room when it happened. Now back to acetylene . . . some guys from a neighboring town were making acetylene bombs near their garage with 32 gallon trash bags. This was to spice up a party they were having. They didn't consider the static charge that Hefty bags can create. I'm not sure how many they had inflated, but when the static charge lit them up prematurely, the blast blew out the windows in the house. The concussion cracked the swimming pool and could be heard for miles. And they're still alive. |
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that some sharp CSI level shit , figureing that out from just the evidence in the car
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I did most of my growing up in Sheridan on Radcliff Drive, so I as well would not have been surprised. |
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I highly doubt this happened with an acetylene filled ballon. Acetylene doesn't burn well by itself and requires a very precise mixture of acetylene and oxygen (not air) in order to explode. It's hard to do by accident. Back when I had more balls than brains I used to build acetylene/oxygen powered cannons out of exhaust tubing. In order to make them work you had to light an oxygen/acetylene torch, adust it for a neutral flame, then extinguish the flame, then inject the resulting mixture in the cannon's firing chamber, relight the torch, turn your face away and put the flame to the ignition hole. If 3" (if I remember correctly) tube is used a tennis ball fits perfectly in it and a 3 foot long cannon will fire a smoking tennis ball about 500 yards.
Now, if he filled the ballon with oxygen and acetylene in that right mixture.....no, he couldn't have been that stupid! Could he? |
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In my younger(stupider) days, I tried the same thing with a 55 gal trash bag and a stack of 39 inch truck tires. Well, it launched the top tire about a hundred feet(not kidding). We once tried it again with one of those huge beach balls. It was as if I put my face in an oven over 50 feet away. Another friend blew the windows out of his house by using a beach ball of the same size. If I were to ever do it again, I would rig up some sort of remote fill/remote detonation apparatus. Also, to add to the fact, I did the same thing with a geo metro. It had pretty much the same effects as the picture.......the stuff's definitely dangerous to play with.
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