In my last post Filler Up, I mentioned how I got in a little trouble refueling my lighter with gasoline. It’s well worth the read. Here’s another gasoline story, I would like to share with you. I was attending the University of Maine in Augusta and at the time I was living with my grandfather in Wiscasset, Maine that was about a 30 minute commute from the university. By now after already experiencing getting burned with gasoline previously, you would think that I would have learned a lesson to never use the stuff ever again.
One Saturday afternoon while at my grandfather’s trailer, the toilet got plugged up and overspilled leaving a ton of water on the bathroom floor. In any event I decided to use paper towels along with toilet paper to soak up the water, because I did not want to trash the mop with toilet water. The problem was by the time I got all the water cleaned up, there was a quite a pile of wet paper towels that I didn’t know what to do with. So a bright idea went off in my head and that was to take the wet paper towels and toilet paper out in the back yard and burn it with gasoline.
This way once burned, the paper towels and the toilet paper would be neatly disposed. What a bright idea- I thought to myself! So I collected all the water soaked paper products by putting them in a bucket and carried the bunch outside a good 100 feet from the trailer and dumped them into a pile. I poured a fair amount of gasoline on them to ensure that they would ignite and burn completely, given the fact of how water soaked they were.
Then I stood back and struck a match and threw it on the paper towel pile and the gas ignited with a roar on the paper towels and my pants. What! My pants! What is up with that? It really caught me by surprise as now I was on fire. But how did this happen? After reflecting back on the events of this incident, I realized that while I was pouring gas on the paper towels & toilet paper, I didn’t realize that I also spilt some gas on my pants as well. So when I let the match, my pants caught on fire. So out of fear and astonishment without thinking in a knee jerking reaction, I started to run until I realized that it was only making things worse!
That’s when I realized what I was taught in school was to stop, drop and roll to put out the fire. So when I realized this fact in my mind I fell on my knees and then used my bare hands to put the fire out that was burning the calves of both of my legs. And to my surprise it worked, as I was able to extinguish the flames on both legs without suffering any burns to my hands. In fact, my pants didn’t burn at all because the cloth material that they were composed of made a perfect wick for the burning off the excess gas that I inadvertently spilled on them.
One thing for sure, I was relieved when the fire was extinguished before any more damage was realized, as it was it was already very painful at this point. Even though I was able to walk away or should I say limp away from this blunder, I did receive 2nd degree burns on my legs. It felt like as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat. Hence I was unable to play soccer that fall, because it was to painful for me to walk and especially to run at that time. All in all- it took about a month for my burns to heal. The moral of this story is never to use gasoline for starting any type of fire, as it's just to volatile and dangerous!
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