OT Shop Vac and Gasoline

Got this in an Email today. Interesting, but sad.

".. They Were Almost Finished With The Floor and The Shop-Vac Was Nearly Full of Gasoline When The Explosion Occurred ..." Does More Need To Be Said?

How can anyone so stupid live to be 56-years-old?

Carrol Laverne Uitermarkt, 56, and Ralph Touch of Prairie City, Iowa, decided that the best way to clean the basement floor was to pour gasoline on it and then suck the gasoline up with an electric powered Shop-Vac vacuum cleaner because we are all so stupid that we don't know we can use gasoline to clean floors and instead we use non-flammable cleaning fluid and a mop.

If only it was a spark of intelligence and not a spark of electricity ...

"... they were almost finished with the floor and the Shop-Vac was nearly full of gasoline when the explosion occurred. ...the explosion blew out the windows and bowed the walls and foundation. A property to the east was also damaged."

Touch who happened to be outside at the time was spared material injury, but Uitermarkt is severely burned and has miraculously survived the explosion.

And now the floor is all dirty again.


Des Moines Register (Iowa) 26-Aug-08
nnalert original story
Des Moines Explosion

That's just retarded.

It's said God looks after children and fools but nothing is said about idiots......

Somebody in MD did something similar within the last 3-4 years, I think it was an old man in Glen Burnie, locked his keys in his (running) car, tried to vacuum out the gas, result, big fire, burns, no car!

No issue here. This is an example of how natural selection works. Luckly for these clowns the aim was a little off.

I read about a kid a few years ago who had motor oil spilled all over his jeans. So he soaked them in gasoline before throwing them in the washing machine. Exact same result. He was lucky not to be in the laundry when it exploded but pretty well wrecked his parent's home!!

We had something like that here, a guy was trying to clean off the adhesive from the old tile in the basement with some highly flammable solvent. His concerned MIL decided to turn on the fan in the HVAC system to give him some fresh air down there. WHAMMO!! Luckily he only recieved a few burns, but he probably killed half his brain cells from the fumes. And he didn't have any to spare.

It's a bit of an urban legend.
There is a club and competition with shop vacs that can blow the flames farthest for the longest duration of time.

guy here in nm was blowing out an ion filter with propane,lost the entire service porch,but was blown out of the room unscathed

I used to gather the gold fish out of the pond for winter with the shop-vac. thupe, thupe, thupe.

One gallon of gasoline vaporized has the eplosive power of 88 sticks of dynamite.
During WW11 the new Japanese carrier Taiho was hit by a single torpedo fired by the US submarine Albacore. The ship was not signifigantly damaged but a leak was sprung in an avgas bunker. Poor damage control by an inexperienced crew resulted in the gas fumes being vented throughout the ship instead of overboard as intended. When the concentration of fumes was strong enough a spark from a switch or motor ignited the fumes and the explosion buckled the flight deck and blew the bottom out of the ship which quickly sank with most of the crew.

Sounds like presidential candidate material to me.

Life guard of the gene pool.

Although at the age of 56 he was done reproducing and the life guard might of been late in this case.