#gas fire

It wasn’t too big, don’t worry, but thinking about it all is terrifying me.

We had just replaced our gas, and in the country I live in you don’t really have a professional do it, you just do it yourself. Anyway, long story short, we were missing a vital part of the tank that stopped gas from flowing into our kitchen through our stove even though our stove was off.

It had only been doing that for twenty minutes when my mom turned the stove on, so there was a lot of gas in the room but not as much as there could have been. The only reason my parents, little brother, and I were in there was because I wanted to have an early lunch and everyone else was joining me. That’s the only thing that stopped the gas from continuing to flow for an hour, or two hours. If I hadn’t decided to have lunch early, my whole entire house would have exploded and my family would have died.

My mom and I were the closest. I only barely burned my arm, but my mom took the brunt of it. She was standing right in front of the stove when she turned it on, and she now has first and second degree burns on her stomach. The explosion caused her shirt to catch on fire, and because I live in South America and it’s hot as shit all the time, her shirt was extremely thin and provided no protection whatsoever. She fell down hard as she tore it off, and also hurt her back and hips in the process. She’s going to be okay, but she’s resting for a while, obviously.

In the country I live, most houses are made out of stone and brick. That’s the only reason our house didn’t burn down. 

We don’t even own a fucking fire extinguisher.

I stayed and learned for 10 hours of a 12 hour gas fire yesterday. We had the lights on most of the night but had to appreciate the glowing for a few minutes. There was only one very loud unexpected bang during the firing, so hopefully that's a win!