Ricochet Rockets in the Basement

Life Lesson: Cleanliness and organization are good habits

The fireworks lab was in the basement in our home in Windham, Maine. I was not yet very tidy down there and often left odds and ends from long past projects lying around on the workbench. It was on a Saturday when this next little fiasco occurred. Lori was away from the house for some unknown reason, but at least some of the children were home. However, I was working alone in the basement at the time. I don't remember what I was even working on, but I was using my electric grinding wheel to sharpen or shape some piece of metal. The nature of grinding wheels is that they quite often produce a lot of bright metal sparks shooting out the back side of the grinding wheel.

Now, normally, this is not a real fire hazard because the sparks are not hot enough to start fires or even cause damage to the surrounding surface of the work bench. However, I had left a paper cup of flammable powder of some kind on the work bench. It was left over from some other project and never properly disposed of. After many months of sitting on the back of the work bench, I didn't even take notice of the cup or what dangerous substance might still be lurking inside. As you can guess, the sparks from the grinding wheel ignited this cup of powder and caused a large poof of flame that startled me quite a bit. This was not the end of the incident, however. Lying next to the paper cup were a few fireworks rockets. They were meant for large stick rockets, a lot like bottle rockets, but much larger. Whereas bottle rockets are about one and a half inches long and attached to a foot long stick, my stick rockets were about six inches long and normally would be attached to 3-foot-long sticks. Well, the flash and flame from the paper cup caused the fuses of the rockets to ignite and before I could react they were flying around in the basement, ricocheting off the walls and ceiling just like a Wiley Coyote cartoon. The whole basement quickly filled up with smoke and then the smoke alarm started wailing.

All this racket caused Megan to wonder what was going on in the basement. She opened the door to the basement, only to discover it was filled with smoke and the alarm was still making an ear-piercing noise. About this time, I finally got my wits about me and quickly told Megan to close the door so the smoke wouldn't go upstairs. My first act to recover from this disaster was to grab a pillow and stuff it around the fire alarm to deafen the awful noise. Then I opened the patio door to let the smoke go outside. Gradually, the smoke cleared and the fire alarm stopped its annoying wail. It was then I realized that some sparks of some kind had managed to get under the cuff of my shirt and caused a nasty burn. I still have a nice little scar on my arm that reminds me of my stupidity to this day. Fortunately, no other harm was caused by the incident and I again considered myself very lucky that I escaped with only a bit of a burn on my arm.

From this scary incident, I learned that cleanliness and organization are good habits to have when working with explosives. A little carelessness on one day can cause a serious accident to sneak up on you many days in the future when you least expect it to happen. Alas, my lesson still didn't prevent other fiascos to follow.