hehe
2 years ago a friend of mine set a barn on fire :)
(synthacon9 likes white wine and nutella, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 20:16, Reply)

Never mine, but I always seem to be around.
Back in High School science class our teacher would often leave the class alone for 10-20 minutes. So my classmates in the back would often get bored. One day they happened to have a bottle of liquid cement (it was a very flammable kind of glue) anyways they decided it would be fun to light it on fire. The thing that they realized after they lit the thing on fire was that the bottle for the liquid cement was made out of plastic, not glass. So the glue on fire quickly melted the plastic bottle which caused the glue to spill out onto the table and cover their books in flaming glue. The teacher finally ran back into the room and grabbed a fire extinguisher and stopped the fire. But not before the table and books had been destroyed.

Another story but from my friend. She was driving her Lotta down the road and she noticed that it was starting to smoke, so she thought that it maybe was just overheating so she pulled into the nearest gas station to phone her Dad to come and fix her car. So she parked her car and went into the gas station and got a drink and tried phoning her dad. When she came back out she saw that there was a lot of smoke coming out from her car and there was also flames now coming out. Soon her car was engulfed in flames. The gas station was surrounded by a dry field of grass. So the flames from her car started the field on fire. The gas station that she was at was located pretty far from any fire station, so by the time that the firemen got there her car was just smoldering. It had pretty much melted and the field was still on fire. The firemen covered the entire gas station in white foam and many of the people who had been at the gas station questioned my friend “Why would you park a car that is on fire at gas station?”
(dincauze, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 20:11, Reply)

Ahurhurhur.
A year or so ago I rather drunkenly held my cigarette against a friend's shirt by accident. It wasn't until he started choking that any of us noticed the growing black mark on his arm.

In related news, my grandad hung his coat next to an old coal oven last week and that cought alight quite dramatically.
(Text_Fish -- Humourcide., Tue 2 Mar 2004, 20:10, Reply)

Only a few weeks ago
After eating some lovley mushrooms a few friends and i thought it would be a good idea to have a fire in the back garden of my flat.
Having just got a new sofa I thought the old one would make for good fuel, big mistake.
I couldnt believe the acrid black smoke, it was fucking everywhere. This being the middle of town someone called the fire brigade, cue mass paranoia and hiding in bushes for hours afterwards. Magic
(ginger weasel - "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" Gonzo but not forgotten, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 20:01, Reply)

I was in the ATC
I was doing my gliding scholarship at RAF Halton, and during the day there was very little to do, as you flew for an hour a day, and sat around for the rest of it.

This is when my love of fire started, August several years ago. We were sat outside our block, and two people happened to smoke. So, I started playing with their lighters, jacking them up and the usual thing. Then I started burning items. Taking labels off of drinks bottles and burning them to give off smoke, burning grass to give a weird smell. I discovered that spider webs burned particularly spectacularly- they disappeared in a ball of fire- along with any unfortunate spider in them...
Hair was next- there was one girl on the course who also had a penchant for burning things. she very stupidly let me burn some of her hair (that's right, the stuff attached to her head). It didn't all burn, but there were some slightly shorter areas and a strange burning protein smell that lingered for a few days.

The next bit of fun was down on the airfield. I was sat down, and decided to make a small bonfire from twigs and leaves. It was doing nicely- until i realised i was directly outside the staff office, next to the hanger and a matter of feet away from a fuel store and some aircraft...

Not really destroying much- but i feel it's the principle of the thing...
(Phil The Easter Chick, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:58, Reply)

Shortly before christmas when I was four
We were in the middle of a powercut, so my ma put a candle by the side of my bed (scared of the dark at the time, over it now).
I used this to set light to my bendy toys to make room for the toys Father Christmas was going to bring me.
Made much worse by the fact my olds didn't have a phone at the time and no neighbours, so had to run to the local phone box to phone the fire brigade.
I have a vague memory of my olds ferrying bowls and buckets of water up the stairs from the kitchen to my bedroom to put it out.
The kitchen was flooded by the amount of water they had to use, and I think it bought the ceiling down eventually.
My next best was flooding the bathroom shortly after; had a waterfall running down our stairs!
They weren't happy
(doobydooby, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:58, Reply)

Fire!!!
JESUS I LOVE THE STUFF!

Back in school, i used to wear an old glove and spray Deodrant on, find someone with a lighter and hilarity ensues.

Oh, and the old deodrant flamethrower trick was a classic too.

Then there's the farmers fields, they were good.
( Snorty McBumhole YouTube.com/MinistryOfGeeks, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:56, Reply)

when i was 11
The very first time I was at a friends house we burnt down his garden shed. To the ground. We were playing with petrol and it spilled on the workbench, and then my friend "placed" the lit match on the workplace, by "accident" (what an idiot). We ran, fireman came, we got grounded for a month each. I'm now 18 and still get called "pyro" in some family circles. O yeh, and this was the time firestarter by prodigy was about, so you can guess the fun I had for years after by my brother singing "your a firestarter, a twisted firestarter" rather frequently.
(monsta, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:54, Reply)

fire!
just the other day i was grilling some bacon, forgot about it and set fire to it.

i still ate it.

and when i was a young denim and leather wearing "rocker", i was cornered by a group of "mods" who poured petrol over me and chased me around with a lighter.

oh such fun!
(robotrobotROBOT, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:49, Reply)

In uni halls
the fire alarm would go off several times a week, and when it went off in one house it set off the alarms in the two either side. Unfortunately for our house, which had never set it off, we were in the middle of the two worst houses for false alarms (smoking in rooms and stuff).

So of course one day when the alarm went off I casually finished my phone-call, put on some shoes, went looking for my jumper then heard my mate shouting "The place is on fire!", assuming he was taking the piss because of how often the alarm sounds I carried on looking for my jumper.

Upon opening my door though I was met with a wall of nasty plastic smoke, none of which had come through up to then. I wandered down to the kitchen to find the two guys who were in planning to run in to grab the fire extiguisher, it seemed, with what little we could actually see that the toaster was on fire. Anders the Danish guy ran in, got the extinguisher and sprayed it a couple of times, then we had to leave it until the fire brigade arrived.


After sitting in the car keeping warm (whilst all the people from the other houses that normally set it off froze) for a while we were allowed back in to our very black and very damp kitchen, the only damage being one destroyed cupboard and of course the toaster.

Here's a pic of it, I can't believe how much black smoke came off such a small thing, but almost all the plastic had gone off it. The black bit of wall is where the cupboard was.


Cause of fire was probably an electrical fault as no-one had been in for about 2 hours. The cupboard belonged to the owner of the toaster who wasn't in, we left it outside for her return with a post-it note on identifying it as hers :)
( NomDePlume fo shizzle my nizzle old bean, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:47, Reply)

Fire in the disco
I once set fire to a neighbours leylandi tree and denied all knowledge of it claiming "I was at the shops and it was on fire when I came back".

They moved a week or so later.

Something I said?
(Higgy, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:39, Reply)

Well it wasn't me...
but a friend of mine once set fire to the school toilets once and was suspended... and when asked "why did you do that?" he replied "i needed to get rid of my matches"

ahh... ,D
( Naive Amoeba Bored Cig, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:35, Reply)

A surprisingly small amount of years ago
Me and a mate of mind created some home made napalm (petrol and polostyrene if you really want to know) I desided to test it well away from where we lived, in some farmers fields. However, it was close to the M1.
We sarted one batch of the jelly based insendery, and the winds quite happly blew it onto the M1. Needless to say, we ran away quite quickly, but as far as I know, no accidents were caused from it. From then on we tested the napalm underneth the motorways bridge.....
(Krizog, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:29, Reply)

when i was younger i set fire to the woods near my house
we were playing with matches as you do when your a kid, i found a pile of dried sticks and leaves, which we set fire too. after a while we stamped it out and left. it must not have been out because when we went back a few minutes later the tree's were gently glowing and flames were spreading throughout the other tree's! it was cool to watch, but we all run away when we saw a local man running out with a hose pipe!
( Rev. Jesse. broke his ankle, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:21, Reply)

I once...
...set fire to an ice cream van because someone told me they'd run out... hehehe... note the ironic post there :)

Seriously though, I nearly set fire to a night club I worked in by having a crafty fag in the stafff room, it set fire to the bin. I put it out, but not before the alarms went off.

A month after I quit it burned to the ground in "Suspicious circumstances"... a week later I nearly burnt down the pub I was working in after I lit a lighter that was leaking. The fireball that engulfed my hand was very impressive, but ultimately, pant-wettingly scary.
(minister of heresy, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:18, Reply)

Not strictly a fire but....
When I was but a wee lad, I was playing on my Amiga like any normal kid, having had a perticuly poor performance on sensible soccer I decided this could not be blamed on me, but the light in my room reflecting on the screen. I decided to turn it off, but no good I can't see the keys on the keyboard! So the next logical solution would be, to but a sock over the light, or so I thought. I turn the light off and but the sock over the bulb, and sat happily playing away. Roughly thirty seconds later the heat from the bulb had set the sock on fire. So I decided to pull it off, but it was to hot to I smashed it down with a baseball bat I have gotten as a birthday present, needless to say my parents weren't to happy that there nine year old son had set his lamp shade on fire with a sock! I knew that baseball bat would be handy for something!
(jonathonmcdowall, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:11, Reply)

...and i nearly died...
my mum went on holiday. i spilt red wine all over the sofa. i then had to wash it, obv.
when i was selecting the amount of time it should be dried for, i hit the dial in horrible, female, pre-menstrual anger. this made it jam.
i went to sleep, and four hours later woke up in a house full of smoke, and had to spend all day and night in hospital. the drier had dried the sofa covers until they set alight.

we had to move house, and have all our furniture and belongings replaced.

its a good job i nearly died, because that's the only reason my mum didn't kill me...
(reddicat, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:09, Reply)

fire-crakcers...
one day, my mate youssef turned up with a fire-cracker, and a view to some explosions. do bear in mind that i'm 15 now, and this was about 6 years ago...
anyhoo, we ste it up round the side of my house on a plant pot, and lit it. the bastardo went out half way down the fuse. then my mates alex and luke turned up. we kept trying to get it to work, but it was a stubborn little shite, and wouldn't burn. we tried one last time, and then we decided that it was getting a little risky, so we tried to put it out with water guns.
it blew up about 2 secs before i pulled the trigger. i couldn't hear for 15 mins...
(notjustahatrack peeling a sausage..., Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:05, Reply)

not
strictly a fire..

but it does have an explosion. and acid.

my story starts at uni, where I studied chemistry. we were conducting some experiment in the lab involving a reaction with chlorosulphonic acid, quite strong stuff that reacts violently with water to form gaseous hydrochloric acid (HCl) and sulphuric acid (H2SO4). thereaction was a bit slow though, so on the advice of the lab assistant the whole setup was put in the cooling chamber, and closed of with a waterlock. this turned out to be a fatal error.. that night, water was sucked in from the waterlock to the reservoir holding the acid. when I entered the cooling chamber to pick up my experiment the next day, I noticed 3 things:
1. my setup had exploded. total yield of the reaction would be 0.
2. sulphuric acid everywhere! over the expensive equipment, measuring gear, and a few other experiments.
3. the best cure for the common cold is 20 secs in a highly acidic athmosphere.

anything alive up my nostrils was now dead. unfortunately, so was the inside of my nose... which started bleeding sponaneously, and continued to do so regularly for 2 weeks.
(radja, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:03, Reply)

Not my fault but..
.. Daft nextdoor neighbour had spent all weekend cladding his house with some shiny uPVC panels, he'd even bought a brand new ladder to reach the high parts. Having finished the job he decides to run the offcut plastic through his standard waste disposal routine and burn it in the garden. My family sat indoors watching the GREEN flames and black smoke engulf the entire neighbourhood whilst my Mum fretted about out new garden fence that had cost oh-so-much just three weeks previously.

You know what's coming don't ya? The green flames caught his shed, which caught our fence which caused my parents to almost combust themselves! I rushed outside to play fireman with the garden hose whilst my dad played firechief by making sure I doused the fence and swearing when I foolishly tried to stop the flames which were creeping up my nieghbours house.

By the time the fire brigade arrived tins of paint had begun to explode inside the burning shed and the neighbour's roof was well ablaze. It took a while to get under control and the guy nextdoor received a massive bollocking from the local 'Guv'.

"You left a fire unattended!?!?"
"No, I went to make a cuppa tea"
"Whilst leaving the fire unattended?"
"No, really, just a cup of tea"
etc.
etc.

PS. His new ladder melted in the shed, the firmen pulled out a solidified puddle of aluminium with two rungs sticking out the top.
(castro, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 19:01, Reply)

I nearly Burnt my Parents business to the ground
Many years ago I lived above a pub, my folks were landlord and landlady, one day a week they had a night off and on this night I decided that it would be a great idea to play with Nail varnish remover, matches and a plastic army tank

Follwing several successful torchings of the plastic tank on my window ledge outside the window, I managed to catch the bottle of nail varnish remover alight.

Being a stupid kid and not thinking I panicked and rather then drop the bottle of burning liquid onto the street below, for some reason I threw it back into my bedroom, spraying hot burning liquid across most of my bedroom in the process.
Meanwhile my sister was watching TV in the lounge room and starts to smell burning, she then decides to investigate, as she leaves the living toom, she see me running to the kitchen screaming that I have set my bedroom on fire.

My sister follows me to the kitchen (all on one floor remember) to grab whatever pots and pans are to hand, fill them with water and put out the flames

anyway we managed not to destoy the pub and cause the deaths of the regular drinkers, we decided to cover the scorch marks with a rug and hope that my folks never noticed


I still remember being dragged out of bed and being beaten by my father. Ahhh happy days :)

There is another story too but that doen't directly involve me
(Twisted_firestormer, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:59, Reply)

me and my mates
used to love making bombs and stuff for fun, we loved to experiment a lot.
One night (about 3am) i decided that i wanted to make a "uber-bomb" to really impress my mates the next day. So i took all the kinds of flameble goodies i could find in my home. i.e. glue, thinner, gasoline... And start building a giant cocktail-mix of explosiveness...
unfortunately i spilled the highly corrosive fluid on my bedroom carpet causing it to burn right thrue. Forcing me to shift my bed to the other side of the room to cover the plastic-burn so my parents wouldn't notice...
After that i decided to throw away the leftovers because i already made another bomb using black powder...
But curious and foolish as i am: instead of throwing the mix away, i set it on fire and THEN threw it away, out of my window into the backyard... I was convinced the fire wouldn't last until the ground, but it did. So i had to go out (5 am and about freezing now) in my shorts to put the fire out.

And even worse: I was convinced my uber-black powder-bomb would surely make up for all of this mess. But unfortunately it didn't work proper causing it to explode to early and burn three little holes in my mates jacket.

luckily everybody had a good laugh at me considering my lack of capability last night...
(don rico, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:49, Reply)

Oh God
I dread to think what's going to come out when my boyfriend sees this weeks topic. One of the best things I've heard of him doing is inflating condoms with either deodorant or exhaust fumes from his moped and putting a lit match near it. Makes a nice fireball, so I hear.
( useful_idiot, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:48, Reply)

I used to...
save every item my ex-gf had ever given to me in a drawer. Letters, bits of hair, random odds and sods. One day she really pissed me off somehow, so I put it all in my bin... and set fire to it. It went up in big fuckass flames to my suprise and I ended up singing half the carpet trying to put it out. Lovely.
(LexWest, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:41, Reply)

um. I set light to a load of cyclohexane
on the chemistry lab desk. which burnt all the varnish off. That was a bit scary. A while before that I shook up a load of sulphuric acid and something else (it was orange) in a test tube, with the stopper in, which exploded in my face, disolving my lab coat and (partially) my trousers. nb. don't spray sulphuric acid up your nose, it stings. I still got a C though (at A level).
(RowdsterDelux, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:40, Reply)

Oh, dear god.
When I was a student, I was at a party coming down from something or other when I muttered "what this place needs is a bit of mindless terrorism". Hey: this was 1988. It was a different world then. Anyway: little did I know what I had started.

Within a few days I had a steady stream of art students coming to me with recipes for gunpowder and a kind of eager look on their faces. To cut a long preamble short, me and a fellow student went on a several-week long comedy reign of terror, letting off bombs that (although causing no damage) could be heard a mile and a half away. We'd let them off by the cellar doors of the student bar, under the windows of anti-social twunts playing overly loud music on a Sunday. It became quite the sport to get maximum impact with minimum chance of detection. Then...

I went to my mate's room to check on production of the next batch of comedy bombs. He handed me a mortar and pestle and said "I've been grinding this all day". He didn't tell me he'd mixed the powder and then ground it - that's a total no-no. He'd also substituted potassium chlorate for the saltpetre in the mixture. In theory, this should go off when you breathe on it, and he'd been grinding a complete mixture ALL DAY with no ill-effects. I ground it ONCE and was engulfed in a 5ft fireball that sucked most of the oxygen from the ground floor and caused the smoke pall from hell. My hair was sticking up and smoking like something out of a cartoon. I had 2nd degree burns on my face and hands, and was rushed to hospital in Wakefield, 6 miles away.

To celebrate my heroics/idiocy, my friends decided to get rid of the evidence by conducting a series of experiments "in my memory". They concluded that

a) throwing a lit bomb into a lake will not stop it going off. On the contrary, it makes the explosion more exciting.

and

b) if you put a lit bomb in a drainpipe, it will blow out the bathplug from two floors away. I believe the victim of the drainpipe bathplug ejection is now the Executive Producer of Fame Academy. Oh, did she look surprised.

I spent the next week bandaged like the invisible man. Quite hilarious.

Kids: don't try this at home. Get your A-Levels and go and do it at Uni.
( sp3ccylad carries on breathing all the way up to, say, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:40, Reply)

oops
I was camping alone in Idaho, and therefore felt the need for a BIG fire (to ward off bears, etc). So I piled up the logs and torched em. I soon noticed that the heat and sparks rising from the flames were reaching the tops of the (very dry) trees...I could see the tops catching fire, so I very quickly doused my blaze and prayed that it wouldn't spread. Luckily, it died down and no wildfire followed. That's one way they get started though.
(lightningwon, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:27, Reply)

A little knowledge
Is a very dangerous thing. Lets just say as a child I was a bit of a whizz when it came to fires. I knew my chemistry. I also knew my history and what makes up various fire related things.

I will not give out details, but a product was made, in the confines of a cola can, which would self ignite on impact, and is very sticky (like syrup) and water didn't do a hell of a lot (like decent napalm).

Just concentrate on English Lit kids, chemistry will get you in all sorts of problems...
( Geej, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:22, Reply)

A fire? I started a beauty!
About a year and a half ago, I went up to a friends place in Devon and we got very drunk. On exiting the final pub, we went to find something to do. This town is at the mouth of a big river and there is a large bay, the edge of which is a path leading to the next place on the coast with a grassy bank stretching down to the water. There is also a boat yard here. After swimming in the river (Oh yes. A bloody great idea that), and being rude to people on passing trains (it's right by the station) we raided the boatyard and managed to find a packet of flares. In attempting to set one off, I dropped the pack and the long grass of the river bank instantly caught alight due to the dry weather. We ran. About an hour later (apprx 3:00am) I went back to see if it'd gone out and there were three fire engines on the scene. Next day inspections showed that we'd managed to burn about 100m of the river bank to black. I'm sorry.
( The Togaboy The world will end on, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:21, Reply)

I did the aerosol can+ lighter thing at army cadets...
I got asked to leave!
(texasjohn, Tue 2 Mar 2004, 18:18, Reply)