13. My house blew up after a gas leak near the fireplace

“When I was 10 years old, less than 10 days before Christmas time there was a gas leak at my house. We had no idea it was leaking, but it had been building up behind our wall near the gas fireplace for a while. In the morning I was getting ready to go to school. My mom was almost ready to go to work, and I was tying my shoes to head out the door. My mom comes out of the bathroom and is putting on her earrings, grabbing her self phone, etc and is heading toward the door. She tells me to unplug the christmas tree lights (we love decorating). When I did the spark from unplugging them ignited the box around the socket, and then the pocket of gas behind the wall. It all blew up. The fire place was pushed out of the wall in one whole piece. The wall was destroyed. The mantle over the fireplace flew clear across the room. The Nutcrackers we left on the fireplace flew across the room and 2 got embedded in the wall. The Christmas tree (luckily a fake plastic one) was knocked over. The side facing the wall was curled, melted, and burned. Almost every ornament made of breakable stuff was shattered. Rather from the boom, or the fall, hard to tell. The shock wave traveled through the house, down the hallway into my moms room and blew out the sliding glass door, and blew it into the pool in pieces the size of pennies or smaller. All throughout the house were stress cracks in the sheet rock. Cracks in windows. Various things. We were lucky. I got minor burns on my face. I was just off to the side of said blown up wall. My mom was sitting on a chair near the door, far away from it all. Had she sat on the couch to put on her shoes (as she does sometimes) she may have been severely injured or worse. There was no real fire. It was more of a blast of really hot air, really fast. The fireman chief called it a “flash fire” There was no fire because there was nothing close enough to the hottest part that could ignite. (good thing we got a fake reusable tree that year to save money) If we had not, it DEFINITELY would of blown up.” — BloodySpies

14. Our boat crashed while my mother-in-law was pregnant

“My husband’s parents lived on a boat off the coast of Asia for a while about 20something years ago. Well when my mother-in-law was about 8 months pregnant with my brother-in-law, the boat sank in the middle of the ocean. It happened slowly, over the course of a day or so, so the couple sent out a bunch of distress calls, packed the important things, and camped out in the lifeboat while the ship sank. They saved a few nice things for their eventual rescuers: a nice canned ham and a good bottle of wine. Well, they were eventually picked up by the Exxon Valdez, which was fortunate. Unfortunately, at the time the crew was entirely Muslim, and as such the canned ham and nice wine weren’t ideal gifts.” — LatrodectusGeometric