December 23, 2009 Boom goes the trailer!!!

Ok, I'm back up and running. I don't have much incentive to blog when my kids beat me to it. Hence, no Aruba blog. Then my camera quit and I just got a new one. All my pictures until now were hand me arounds from my kids so they already had them on their blogs. Anyway ....

December ... ok, let's start with the 23rd.

All the kids plus Perry's parents were coming for Christmas. So we decided that rather than using the air mattress - which no one likes to sleep on - we would just put a couple out in our 5th wheel. It has a queen size regular mattress and it has a great heater. So we gave it a test run the night before where we lit the heater to make sure it would get warm enough in there. This is the coldest winter we have had in 5 years (according to the weather man). It was plenty warm out there so we were ready to go. On the 23rd, I went out to start the heater as we needed it that night. As I opened the door, it reeked of propane. I closed the door and decided to let Perry check it out when he got home. Perry came home and I told him about it. He went out to see about it. About 5 minutes later, I heard what sounded like a sonic boom and the whole house shook. I knew it was Perry in the trailer and that it had exploded. I was sure he was dead. We all ran to the trailer. J'see and Charlie found Perry outside the trailer door applying snow to his burn face and hair. He had cleared the propane and then started the heater. When it flashed, it dived out the open door. He has some minor burns on his face and hands, a lot of singed hair and no eyebrows or eyelashes. He was one lucky man. I was a basket case all night. We brought him inside to check him out and thought we needed to put some aloe vera on his burns, which was in the trailer. He went out to the trailer to get it and discovered the bathroom cupboard on fire. I called the fire department because I wanted to make sure that if the fire got out of hand, my house which is 5 feet away from the trailer didn't go up too!! We got the fire put out before the fire department got here. They put out a smoldering roll of toilet paper and checked Perry's burns out. Anyway, all's well that ends well. I have a husband still!!! The trailer is pretty much totalled as you can kind of see by the following pictures.

All of the exterior walls were bowed out about 5 inches from the blast, all of the window frames were pushed out and bent, the screens were pushed out the window openings and the curtains farthest from the heater were melted. You can see gaps between all of the cupboards and the exterior walls because of the bowing of the walls. I don't know what it would have looked like if the door hadn't been open to vent some of the blast.