Brown rain 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
Perhaps this is worthy of an honourable mention, as the main star of this tale is a much younger me, obviously I cannot qualify for a full award.
One fine summers day during the long holiday enjoyed by school children in the UK, my mother selected a chore for me on our rural property. Now being far from town, we depended on a septic tank for sewage disposal. This lurked in a corner of our land as far as possible from the main house and frequented areas for obvious reasons. The pervious summer my father and I had spend a smelly two weeks installing a lid for this noxious pit consisting of 3 inch thick concrete slabs mounted on 6 inch lintels covering an area of about 12 feet by 6 feet. Now this pit is emptied at the start of every winter, so mid summer it is pretty full and producing a lot of methane, a fact I came to appreciate in detail later on.
y mission that day was to clear the head high weeds from around the tank using a brush cutter. Now this was a significant area and that evening I had amassed a fair pile of weeds to dispose of. Being a country lad, I was no stranger to the joys of a good fire, as that was our preferred way of disposing of most of our rubbish. I soon discovered the addition of a good accelerate such as diesel or even better petrol livened things up. So that evening I piled up the weeds on a flat surface added about 5 litres of petrol ( one small jerry can ) and prepared for some fun. I had learned that lighting with a match was a bad idea , read flash burns , so I constructed a flaming torch to ignite it. All well and good, but I had chosen my flat area to be…….. yes you guessed it , the cover of the methane filled pit! All I remember is applying the torch to the petrol soaked mass, a warm wind and a brown rain of dirt and other stuff and finding myself about 20 feet back from my starting point, dazed but unhurt. I had shattered the entire lid of the tank, chunks of which covered the whole area and broke two of the 6 inch lintels in the blast. The noxious contents of the tank also covered a wide area, including me!
Needless to say i spent the rest of the summer grounded and the next week hosing the results back into the tank.
Submitted on 09/12/2002
Submitted by:
Anonymous
Reference:
1985
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