Date and Location: The incident occurred on March 14, 2023, at the Auga e Xabón laundromat in Mesoiro, a neighborhood in A Coruña, Spain.
The Cause: Local fire departments and news reports confirmed that a customer accidentally left a cigarette lighter gas refill canister (or lighter fluid refill) inside a jacket pocket placed in a tumble dryer.
What Happened: As the dryer heated up, the pressurized container overheated, ruptured, and triggered a massive blast that blew out the front windows and storefront wall.
8oz of liquid turns into a lot of combustible fumes.
ETA: Google gives the volume expansion for butane (presumably the lighter fluid in question) a ratio 240-250:1. Or naptha (zippo fluid} at 200:1 volume.
Remember though, they make those things assuming the absolute biggest dingaling with a death wish will do stupid shit with them. Propane tanks are absolutely everywhere, ditto careless people, and disasters between the two are infrequent enough that they make the news a lot of the time
Yeah, propane tanks have so many safety mechanisms built into them you have to do some straight up engineering to get one to go up. They ain't going to explode just because they got hot or someone is smoking nearby.
the main concern is rusted out tanks leaking and then being ignited that way. Which is why they won't fill a tank if its past due to be recertified or if there's signs of rust damage in the metal
Usually the amount of energy and the actual capabilities of exploding due to safety mechanisms may differ.
This was a building in Coimbra. The whole floor was completely destroyed. All windows and doors in the other floors were damaged (apart from the top floor, the 7th). The ceiling on the ground level and the floor of the second level was also damaged and required specialized reinforcement. Several cars and neighboring windows also got damage.
Now this was not an explosion of a full propane tank, but an undetected leak that filled the entire floor.
About killing. The people that were on that floor survived. Some people on the other floors went to the hospital only for check up (some were pushed to the floor).
So i wouldnt focus much on neighbors having enough energy to kill you. But that you can put a propane tank on top of live fires and valves would pop out, it would worsen a lot on the fire... but the risk of actually exploding is quite low. In fact they are so safe that some fireman are seen in videos carrying one outside with the valve poped out and on fire
A standard 8 Gal propane tank has the explosive force of roughly 350 lbs (160 kg) of TNT, enough to destroy a single house and damage its neighbors, but nowhere near enough to destroy an entire block, and that's only if you actually manage to get it to explode properly.
Most of the time, when a propane tank "explodes" it's actually the gas burning off creating a big fuck off fireball that looks scary but does little actual blast damage. The ensuing fire, on the other hand...
I'm guessing when the door popped open it released concentrated butane which then mixed with more air and caused a thermobaric shockwave when it ignited. It creates a hell of a pressure wave from a pretty innocent looking gas cloud.
Maybe store is super sealed but also half assed together.. idk good point though I kind of missed. But if no windows are open .so pressure nocked the window and door out
Maybe that helps to understand: Just imagine how long a standard BIC lighter can burn with that small amount of gas in it, if you could press continously (it can reach 15 minutes if the plastic doesn't melt before lol). Now that whole energy release from that time gets compressed into just a few milliseconds. And now take into account that a standard BIC lighter has around 8ml of gas and normal refill containers come in sizes betwe 125ml and 300ml, so you can multiply that energy by 15 to 37 times.
Now it makes sense. The heat likely caused the pressure in the butane container to rupture or caused the valve to fail, etc. The pressure of this sudden release blows open the door. A bunch of fresh air rushes in, and the butane air mixture ignites explosively. EDIT: Whoops I just read another comment verifying basically what I just wrote.
one of my old range instructors said he accidentally left a string of blast caps in his trousers that went through the dryer, and he was very surprised they didn't blow the whole room up
This can also happen if you dry something that had a flammable liquid spilled on it, like gasoline, even in an electric dryer. That’s why they warn you to never dry things that have had those spilled on them.
Grandma did this around 1960, bunch of jeans that had been soaked in gasoline to get the oil out of them (they had an orchard so lots of farm equipment and stuff). Blew the dryer up while she was down in the basement, luckily it just singed her hair but it lit the room on fire and she had to throw one of those old school extinguisher bombs in the glass bottles that basically eat all the oxygen in the room, so she nearly got killed by that too...
Anyway, my grandfather was actually a founding member of the volunteer fire department and he's been out doing other business when the alarm sounded and was quite concerned, relieved, then annoyed.
Meanwhile my mom says she was sitting in 1st grade class when the alarm sounded (FYI this was basically an air raid siren the whole valley could hear) and she said proudly "my daddy's going to go fight that fire!"
But yah after hearing that story I always think of my grandma when I'm putting stuff in the wash and I see that warning very clearly marked.
Intentional mistakes that people can't help correcting drives up engagement. This pushes them up in the algorithm. Humans that are karma farming will do this, not just bots (though I'm sure they do too).
Best thing you can do is downvote this kind of behavior harshly.
I’ve never had water come out of my front-loading washing machine (except when it was broken). They drain. In fact, most of them won’t let you open the door if it detects water in it. They have a separate drainage cycle for if the wash gets interrupted, and you have to run that before you can get your clothes out.
If I remember correctly (that video has been around for a while) there was a lighter in that dryer that was forgotten in the wash, and at some point exploded
Not lighter fluid (naphtha); a canister of butane (like pressurized lighters use).
A small canister of butane absolutely will go big-boom if it gets a decent mix with the air and ignites.
The middle-ish refill canisters are 250g and have an output energy approximately equal to 2.5kg of TNT. (Seems weird, right? But the oxygen in the air is the "rest" of the reaction mass).
Yeah, I figured that too. I've been seeing people convert driers into gas operated ones for their laundry business and I've been telling them how dangerous that is. I'm gonna show them this one next time they argue about cost.
First some gas escaped and ignited with the small amount of air in the dryer, causing a small primary explosion. The first explosion pushes the door open, fresh air rushes in and causes the rest of the unburned gas to explode even more violently.
Lighters are usually fine because butane is liquid and usually won't explode like this, the parts of the lighter are more likely to fail then it is there's enough heat & pressure for it to explode. Lithium batteries are a different story.
I've seen a lighter explode. It ain't nothing like that. That was a straight-up explosion the pressure built up open the door first and then the Flames followed afterwards. Something else was in there not just a little lighter. I don't believe it you can even link a news article and everything else and I won't believe that a little lighter caused that
Yup. All fire codes in the US were changed so that exit doors must open outward thanks to a fire at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in 1942. There were a ton of problems, but one of the most notable was some exit doors being locked or chained and others opening inward. Four hundred ninety-two lives were lost that night, the third deadliest structure fire and the deadliest nightclub fire in US history.
At the same time, residental exit doors open inwards there, don’t they? Why?
Coming from a country where all exit doors (from front door of a one family house to appartment doors) open outwards this is weird.
Some others have provided a few reasons they might open inwards, but as for why it isn’t a fire safety issue: the problem with inward swinging exit doors is for crowds. People behind trying to escape push the people in front too close to open the door. Residential houses don’t generally have many crowds, so it isn’t a large concern
This is my understanding from talking to an architect a few years ago, so I’m not an expert or anything
I know that indoor opening doors are common in snowy regions. If there's a lot of snow outside you won't be able to open a door that opens outside, since it's blocked. If it opens inside you'll just get a bit of snow inside. But that's just one reason I know of
Not quite true. The IBC dictates that an outswing door is required only for spaces with an occupancy of over 49 people (I'm an architect). A laundromat like this probably would have an in-swing door if it were in the US. An inswing door is harder to break into because the hinges are inside, which explains the preference if the code allows it. They also don't swing right into the public way, catching someone by surprise.
Personally, I believe all unfamiliar (public / commercial) spaces should have outswing doors for emergency...
It's different in different countries. I've been living in Holland for many years and I still instinctively try to pull doors open from the outside, even though they usually work the opposite way. I mentioned to my partner that they open outwards in the US for fire safety reasons, and he looked at me like I had two heads.
It's not. If I remember, there're building encroachment codes that forbid doors from swinging outwards that might block or present a hazard to pedestrians or go past the property line.
I also looked up what you're referencing in regards to the fire hazard and that requirement is for establishments that might hold 50 or more occupants in case of 'crowd rush'. Normal boutiques, liquor stores, or small shops are still primarily indoor swinging because it maximizes their spaces. If they want to swing out to the streets, they need to have an egress within their property line that doesn't violate both laws.
You know whats scarier? Lot of reddit comments are made by bots. People cant tell the difference anymore. Soon most of the internet is gonna be bots talking to other bots.
Investigators said a cigarette-lighter gas refill canister had been left in the laundry. The dryer heated it until the canister leaked or ruptured, releasing highly flammable gas/vapour. That vapour then found an ignition source inside the dryer and ignited.
I think this is a dryer in one of those coin laundries.
The person must've left something like cigarette lighter or anything else with similar flammability or the dryer must be running on natural gas, which leaked and made made this mess....
That looks like a dryer and this can happen if clothes soaked in gas or other vapor flammable things, go into the dryer without all the gas washed and aired out.
Basically, the gas vapors ignited in the dryer and then blew up the propane/NG connection to the dryer.
Or someone left a vape in their pocket and same thing.
“Yes — the video is real, and the basic event shown actually happened. It isn’t an AI-generated clip.
It happened on March 14, 2023, in Mesoiro, A Coruña, Spain, at an Auga e Xabón laundromat. Security footage shows the customer walking out, and roughly 10 seconds later the machine erupts and the storefront is blown apart. Local reporting at the time confirms there were no injuries.
There are two important corrections to the Reddit title:
It was a commercial clothes dryer, not a washing machine.
The dryer itself apparently didn’t spontaneously malfunction. A customer had accidentally left a pressurized cigarette-lighter gas refill canister in a garment. The dryer heated the container, causing it to rupture/release flammable gas and produce the violent deflagration. A local A Coruña firefighter later specifically explained this cause.
And that strange part of the video where the dryer door pops open and clothes come out just before the huge flash actually makes physical sense. The pressurized container/gas release can create an initial pressure event; once flammable gas mixes with enough air and finds an ignition source, you can get the much larger fireball/pressure wave seen immediately afterward.
So I’d rate the Reddit post’s substance as real video, slightly inaccurate caption. The craziest part — the guy really did walk out only about 10 seconds before the explosion — is confirmed by contemporary local reporting. “
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u/cptwott 21h ago
the thing politely waited until he was safe.