Sounds like the lamentable demise of the Graf Spee. I had a motorized model of the formidable German pocket battleship. When it came time to mothball her, one night, I pried the deck open with a pocket knife, filled her to the gunnel's with calcium carbide, replaced the deck and covered it with flammable plastic cement. [See where this is going?
Solemnly we took her down Springfield Pond, in Springfield Park in Springfield Gardens, Queens. A flip of the switch and her mighty screws sprung to life one last time. A strike of a match set the plastic cement afire as she made for the center of the pond, her majestic wake glimmering in the dim park lights. As the fire did its grim and mute work, she began shipping water, the water reacting with a full load of calcium carbide to produce ethylene gas, which ignited by the flaming deck made a column of flame five feet high on the still wintry pond.
Have we had this conversation before? My personal best (along with my brother) was our third Fletcher-class Revell destroyer. We built M-80's into the hull during construction . . . the resulting explosion sent burning plastic and petrol onto our roof. My brother says that when he looked over at my dad expecting the worst (I was hosing the roof), he saw him laughing.
Springfield Gardens??? I grew up in Fresh Meadows, but my Grandparents lived in St. Albans, near the Jamaica water works, on 193rd St.!
LC