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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.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.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.
