Posted on 02/24/2022 10:00:25 AM PST by Red Badger
If you're looking for a true recipe for disaster, look no further than "homemade" and "rocket fuel". Unfortunately, one student at the Brigham Young University, Utah, thought making his own DIY version of rocket fuel would be a good idea, and it ended about as well as you might expect – large fireball, sprinklers flooding the entire dorm, 22 upset students out of living for a while.
Police and fire crews arrived at the scene on Sunday afternoon after a fire alarm was heard at the student dorms of Heritage Halls. Upon inspection, the building was flooded with water and the remnants of an intense fire still burned. The fire department quickly extinguished and secured the scene.
It was revealed that a student had decided to try his hand at creating DIY rocket fuel on the stovetop.
As expected, rocket fuel is particularly volatile and exploded into a violent fireball as it was on the stove, which quickly engulfed the kitchen and sparked the sprinkler system to douse the fire, writes the BYU police department in a Facebook post.
The sprinkler resulted in the kitchen communal area – which has a toilet on display right in the center for some unknown reason – being entirely flooded. While you might expect the amount of rocket fuel to be relatively small for a home experiment, it was actually quite a substantial amount.
“It wasn’t a small amount — it was a potful,” said BYU Police Lt. Jeff Long, in a statement reported by the Washington Post.
“It really could have been catastrophic.”
It is unclear exactly what type of propellant the student was cooking up, but judging from the blaze it was probably something better kept to a controlled laboratory.
“Fortunately, no one was injured but some dorm residents will be displaced due to the flooding caused by this kitchen chemist incident. Please keep your experiments in the lab and supervised by trained professionals,” the BYU police department wrote in their post.
Residents are now living elsewhere while the mess is cleaned up, and the "rocket man" in question may now face criminal charges and a fine for damages that have equated to at least $100,000 (£73,800).
“It is clear that this situation could have been much worse and we are grateful that no one was injured. We urge students to be aware of circumstances around them and consider how their actions have the potential to effect not just themselves, but others as well,” the department wrote in an update on Monday.
I don’t see what could go wrong.
Another rocket scientist heard from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNMp4d9zCUc
Phil Hartman selling Rocket Fuel Malt Liquor. Classic bit.
This ain’t Rocket Surgery!..................
It was revealed that a student had decided to try his hand at creating DIY rocket fuel on the stovetop.
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Move over Stovetop Stuffing!
With potassium nitrate and sugar, you should always use a double boiler...
Yeah, surrrrrrre he was cooking “rocket fuel”, unless “rocket fuel” is a kind of meth that’s currently popular in Utah... :P
A friend of mine in the Marines tried to make his own ‘Flash Powder’.
He smoked Lucky Strikes.
He had a sample in a dish in front of him.
Ash fell into the dish, burned his face and arms.
He almost got court martialed..................
Was this done by little Achmed the clockmaker who was the genius that Obama wanted to receive an award?
Must be a chemistry major ….
Always add the unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine to the fuming nitric acid, never the other way around!
I made sugar and potassium nitrate smoke bombs on a stovetop. Also a bad idea. (Turns out, cooking was an unnecessary step, but that was before the days of a helpful internet and we had to rely on passed around copies of the Anarchists Cookbook.)
Did he have a rocket he intended to fuel?
Actually, when I was in undergrad, there was a Chem PhD. student at UWaterloo, who was busted for running a little side-business cooking meth in a rented unit in a strip mall a few blocks off campus. He ended up beating the charges because the Kitchener-Waterloo Police had destroyed all his chemicals, and his lawyer was able to point out to the judge that as a trained chemist, his client could quite easily demonstrate that the amount of chemicals he’d had on hand, and the amount of meth he could have theoretically produced was far less than the ‘cop-math’ figures that the court had been provided with by the police, and hence his client could not properly defend himself, as the evidence had been destroyed. The judge agreed and threw the case out. :P
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