THE EXPLODING SODA POP BOTTLE

Some time ago, as my wife finished washing the coffee air pot from our genealogy meeting and was letting the warm water run to rinse it out, the glass bottle inside the pot exploded.  Or, you could actually say the bottle imploded since it was under a vacuum.  The explosion was very loud and frightening but thankfully my wife was not injured.

This incident reminded me of an exciting and frightening event that happened to me as a teenager at our Colvin and Jones Store in Unionville.  The event I remember from years ago at the store I call “the exploding soda pop bottle”.  One of my many jobs around the store was to fill the cold drink cooler before closing so that the drinks would be cold for our customers the next day.  The cooler was not anything like you see today in our modern stores.  It was a large insulated metal cooler that was filled with water which was cooled and circulated to keep the drinks cold.  The drinks were stored in wooden crates of twenty four bottles that had compartments to keep the bottles separated.  I had to carry the crates from the storage room outside into the store to load into the cooler.  It was the middle of the summer and had been an extremely hot day.  The bottled drinks had gotten very hot and I made the situation worse by giving the bottles a good shaking while bringing them into the store.

After bringing several crates into the store, I began to place the drink bottles into the ice-cold water in the cooler.  I finished loading one crate into the cooler with no problems but about halfway through the second crate something happened.  I had just placed two bottles into the water and reached down to get more when there was a loud explosion.  I ducked down and when I looked over into the cooler, saw that the upper part of one of the bottles was missing and the ceiling above the cooler was dented from the flying bottle top.  It seems that the combination of the hot summer day, the shaking that I gave the bottle and then placing the bottle in the cold water caused excessive pressure in the bottle that made it explode.  I was lucky to have been reaching for another drink bottle and out of the way of the flying bottle top.  From that time on, I was very careful to take care not to shake the drink bottles and to stay out of the way when placing them in the cold water of the cooler.