It’s certainly not every day that a toilet explodes and better yet, no one has any idea as to the true reason why. A toilet exploded at a dentist’s office in Texas, which left people curious about the incident.
Maggie Kieffer works at the front desk at Circle C Dental in Austin, Texas. When she arrived at work one morning, she immediately knew something was wrong as the smell of smoke covered the entire place.
She and her colleagues determined that the smoke was coming from the staff bathroom near the back of the building. When they opened the door to the bathroom, they were completely shocked at what they found. “Our toilet exploded,” Kieffer said. “It was black, (and) looking up at the ceiling where the vent should have been, there was just a black hole… I had no answers, just a lot of questions.”
Shards of ceramic shrapnel covered the bathroom floor and the toilet had become a stub of its former self. Pieces of the toilet had also heated to the point that they melted into black sludge.
The Austin Fire Department completed an investigation of the incident and determined that the ceiling vent overheated, set on fire and dropped onto the toilet seat which started to burn. The toilet would’ve gotten so hot that the ceramic bowl cracked.
Instead of believing that option, Kieffer had a theory of her own. She discovered a story about a toilet in Oklahoma that was inside an apartment building that had been struck by lightning. The bolt had traveled through the exhaust vent and exploded the toilet.
Weather archives indicate that there was no record of lightning during the timeframe this happened but there was some rain. Since there was no eyewitness to the incident, who knows for sure what really happened to the toilet.
Source: https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/mystery-of-exploding-toilet-at-south-austin-dental-office/