I've got two stories:
A more than a few years ago there was a story with a byline out of St Louis. Seems a gentleman's car wouldn't start and he believed it to be a frozen fuel line. His idea was to heat up a really large open pan of gasoline on his apartment stove and pour it into his gas tank. Who would of thought that a kitchen full of gasoline fumes is explosively flammable?!?!?!?! No one was killed, but it did burn down the apartment building.
When I was in high school in the late 70's I was out cruising around in a buddies car one afternoon. We saw this sudden column of white/gray smoke appear nearby that quickly turned to large column of black smoke. We found the source within 5 or 10 minutes and just as we arrived the fire breeched the attic and was consuming the roof. Watched this house burn to the ground within like 20 minutes/half and hour. There was a story in the local paper the next day. Seems this gentleman had a smoldering fire in his fireplace he wanted to stoke, so he threw a gallon of heating oil on it. Now ordinarily this wouldn't be such bizzare occurance, until the story indicated the man's profession.
He was a fireman for the local fire department!
P.S. Just how do you live that one down! "Hey Bill, burn anyone's house down today?" or "Bill, when you say you are a fireman you know that means you're supposed to
PUT FIRES OUT, right?
Mike L.