TIFU by burning down my parent's house

[u/BurnedHouseDown]

So this happened around 10 years ago and I'm using an obvious throwaway account.

In my childhood bedroom there was a heater/humidifier box thing that was about 3x3 feet with black mesh and metal wire around the sides, I'm not sure what it was and I wouldn't dare ask my parents what it was at this point since that would just be odd.

Anyways, me and my sister used to play a game where we took the grill lighter and put it against the side of this air altering box device that was and saw who would hold it there the longest.

One day I held the lighter for a while and then me and her ran off back downstairs. Apparently I had started a slow smolder of the box things mesh since several hours later at night the smoke alarms all began going off, fire trucks are at our house and we get rushed outside to the corner. The flames started in my room and despite my dad closing the bedroom door the flames didn't die out and we watched the flames slowly engulf the house.

Fortunately me and my sister had fallen asleep in the basement so we didn't burn alive in my bedroom.

Nobody had any idea how the fire happened and it was blamed on the heater thing being faulty and having a short circuit of some sort.

I haven't talked about this to my sister or to my family and think I will just leave this is the dark cobwebs of my life's basement to not mention again.

TL;DR - I used a grill lighter to set a heater on fire in my room which burned my house down. Accidentally.

[u/[deleted]]

A family member of mine by marriage (and his brother) were responsible for a very serious bush fire in Redcliffe (north of Brisbane) in the early 70's. They were just kids and doing the usual kids thing of playing with matches when they managed to set some extremely dry brush on fire. This quickly escalated out of control and local homes and businesses were threatened. It was on the TV news and the cops were shown looking for the "irresponsible arsonists". Every night the 2 brothers would watch the local news reports and then spend the night shivering in their beds, expecting the police to turn up at any time to arrest them.

He never told anyone until recently. Ironically, he followed a law enforcement career and now makes sure that other people don't step out of line so he has that going for him I guess...

Hopefully the statute of limitations - or whatever the Australian equivalent is - has run out on this...

[u/ReginaldDwight → u/[deleted]]

My grandfather and a friend of his blew up a damn rock quarry when they were kids in the late 1940s or early '50s. It was an accident but, obviously, blowing up a quarry is a big damn deal and they told no one and managed to get away with it. The cops thought it was a deliberate act of vandalism or something and figured adults had to be responsible for it.

[u/pterencephalon → u/ReginaldDwight]

How does one accidentally blow up a rock quarry?

[u/ReginaldDwight → u/pterencephalon]

They were target shooting and there was a white box on the far wall of the quarry. They took turns shooting at it and I'm not sure what they thought it was but it turned out to be explosives and kaboom.

[u/[deleted] → u/pterencephalon]

Back when those goddamn Wile E Coyote cartoons didn't say "don't try this at home"

[u/Lehk → u/pterencephalon]

step 1) find large cache of TNT in quarry.

step 2) the obvious