ExecuDork posted:

I detonated a propane oven once. Propane explodes slowly, I had enough time to think "I have made an error" as the wall of blue flamed rolled into me.

I'll back up.

In 2009 I was working as a field technician in the Canadian High Arctic, measuring plants and soil and so forth at the most northerly police station in the world. When they built the very basic buildings in 1953, the RCMP installed a propane-burning cooker, a big white enameled thing with three internal chambers (oven, warming oven, toaster drawer), four burners on top, and about half a square metre of clean white work surface on the side. It fed off of a big propane tank just outside the kitchen window, which would last us about a month. There were 7 of us there for just shy of two months in the short High Arctic summer.
Poking Around Base Camp 1 by by ExecuDork, on Flickr

One other person and I spent a week on top of the mountain just west of the valley, and when we returned to base the other 5 people had gone off up another nearby valley for a few days. All of this travel was by helicopter. So we had the place to ourselves and the selection of food was better than the endless cans we'd been eating from up on The Dome. The other person went to bed early that night*, to her tent not far from the buildings. I was hungry and excited to find some reasonably-fresh bread in the kitchen. I decided to have some toast.

* We were well above the Arctic circle, and this was early August. The sun did not set, at all, the entire time I was up there. "Night" refers to the time between about 9pm and 7am, when the sun is roughly to our north.

The other group of people had told us they'd swapped the propane cylinder just before they'd left, and I'd had to re-light the stovetop (one pilot light somehow works for all four burners, with the exception of the back-right which was always a bit of a problem getting started) already. I forgot that the oven had its own, separate pilot light, accessed through hole at the bottom of the largest oven chamber.

I turned the oven on and put some bread into the toast drawer. This is a narrow drawer under the warming oven, and the flames below the warming oven are directly above the drawer. This was the worst toaster when it was working properly. It had the classic syndrome of bread-bread-bread-bread-bread-glance away for a second-BURNT. So I wasn't too surprised at the long delay, and just finding cold bread every time I opened the drawer to check. Then I clued in (halfway). There was no flame! Because the pilot light had not been re-lit since the cylinder change! Where did I put that BBQ lighter....?

I opened the main oven door and leaned in with the BBQ lighter. Just as I was inserting the flame into the little hole, a voice in my head stated "the gas has been on for several minutes and this ancient cooker has no safety cut-offs".

BOOOOOOOM

I woke up on my back on the floor in the middle of the kitchen. I immediately checked myself for flames and burns and found neither, and also no arm hair. I still had my eyebrows and my beard, and the smell of burning hair was very faint and coming only from the little curled up bits of charred follicles on my forearms. The kitchen floor was also filthy with decades worth of crumbs and dust from under the oven as well as an entire layer of peeling paint, stripped from the walls by the blast. The knick-knacks on the window ledge opposite the cooker were all on the table, and a cloud of dust lingered in the room.

The toast was perfect.