The loudest bang you've ever heard....

Excuse the parody thread...

This morning I was getting my bike out the shed when an outlet on the back of our neighbour's house kind of exploded. It wasn't THAT loud, more like a loud balloon popping, and because it was cold a lot of steam or gas was released, and I think I could smell gas. I was in a hurry to get to my train and couldn't do anything about it.

What was this most likely to be? A gas explosion? I always assumed those would be much louder.

When I was serving on a grand jury last year, the panel got a tour of various departments throughout the courthouse and police department, including the firearms forensics department. The technician there had us all put on ear protection, then shot four rounds out of a .357 pistol into a water tank. Even with the ear protection, it was just about the loudest thing I had ever heard in my life.

No idea, but I figures this would be about really loud sex, the sound of ass slapping reverberating down hallways, etc

The loudest non-sex bang I ever heard was a bolt of lightning that must have struck within 25 feet if our house when I was a kid. The whole room flashed white, almost blindingly, there was a deafening non-sex bang, and the dead silence. I still believed in god and heaven and apocalypse and rapture back then, and I genuinely thought that the rapture might have happened and that I was "left behind"

iPhone typos, sorry ;_;

quarry blast.

a little bit of thundersnow a few weeks ago, i think. i walked home through the perfectly pleasant snow and when there i heard the sky collapse multiple times and soon had a facebook news feed full of people who had awoken thinking something had exploded v nearby.

bolt of lightning hitting the house seconded

when I was living in central FL a friend and I were walking into a restaurant before a thunderstorm and lightning and thunder flashed directly above us — like so close that the flash and bang happened simultaneously — there were several other people walking in and we all yelped and ran inside.

the lightning looked like this:

http://www.benbest.com/cryonics/Astrocyte.jpg

pfft, Lightning Bolt plays at you guys' houses and all you do is complain about the noise.

In Dec 1996 we had the second biggest windstorm ever recorded around here. I was trying to get home and was within a block of my house when I ran into a roadblock that had been hastily thrown up a couple of minutes before I got there. A falling tree had uprooted a natural gas line and there was a massive gas leak. I knew the people who lived next door to where the leak was, so I went in to call my wife (no cell phone back then).

As I was waiting to use the phone the gas leak ignited and exploded, causing the front wall of house next door to the one I was in to blow in, bringing its roof down and starting a big fire. -- Loudest bang I ever heard! --

Yes. I made it home OK. My wife heard the explosion, too and was scared to death, not knowing what it was. I knew.

Three .45ACP rounds being fired about ten feet to my right. The range was cold, people had eye and ear protection off, changing targets, etc. And one dumbass decided to start shooting.

had lightning hit nearby a few months ago....think i was reading ilx at the time

car alarms / screaming kids

I was pumping up the tyre on a bike I was repairing at my old shop years and years ago, using a footpump. I zoned out, the tyre blew off the rim ._. That got my attention pretty fast. I was deaf in one ear for a day or two afterwards.

probably gunshot in london fields in the summer...more like a crack than a bang but v loud nonetheless

@Pashmina the same thing happened to me, except it was compressed air at the gas station I had selected to fill my bike tires. It was unbelievably loud and I too was deaf in the ear closest to it as I had to sit down near the tire to put the nozzle thingy on the tire. Stupid 10 year old that I was. Unforgettable tho!

The police shooting the guy in the flats next-door, about a week after I first moved to melbourne. He'd come flying out of a smashed window waving a sword at them, so they shot him.

I didnt know guns were so damn loud.

Buncefield oil depot explosion, 2005
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4517962.stm
Heard it clearly and I live about 50 miles away.

One Fourth of July somebody down the block set off what sounded like a trash can full of dynamite. Seriously, I expected to look outside and see formerly parked cars raining from the sky.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/45/Boeing_KC-135Q_refueling_SR-71.JPEG/800px-Boeing_KC-135Q_refueling_SR-71.JPEG

Sonic boom from a SR-71 with the afterburners lit up full. March Air Force Base air show 1982

Supposedly they were practicing "low altitude detection avoidance"

^Gotta agreed with you on the sonic booms. Growing up on the coast, F-15s would fly missions over the ocean and their sonic booms would be so friggin loud they rattled windows and whathaveyou

reason why the concord never flew the continental US

Also, my college roommate's girlfriend was very loud at banging too :/

The loudest smang you ever heard...

a couple years ago this neighbor kid's car exploded (for apparently the second or third time!) a few houses down. that was pretty loud.

he had left his car's speaker system running with some faulty wires or something.

Threw a firework in a metal bin when i was younger, 1st and last time i ever did it, my ears were ringing for a bout 2 weeks.

i heard buncefield explosion too, living in west london (so nearer than snoball, but still 30+ miles). wasn't that loud when it got here, obv, but that's clearly what it was. i used to work on the same road as it, probably less than a kilometer away.

that was five years ago today

hope you didn't have to look that up

gonna leave a deodorant can on the radiator in respect 2 the startled (ptsd wrecks lives)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire

amazed nobody died

i didn't hear it but i have photos of the cloud over london

slept thru the accursed thing as well, was at my friend's house in w london so closer to the blast but snugness trumped soundwaves that morning

this one 22-year old who liked it rough

i was about 600 feet away from the explosion of the single largest bomb that's ever gone off in British peacetime; the IRA bomb in Manchester in 1996.
that took some beating i can tell you.

Sonic boom from a SR-71 with the afterburners lit up full. March Air Force Base air show 1982

Supposedly they were practicing "low altitude detection avoidance"

― Stockhausen's Ekranoplan Quartet (Elvis Telecom)

In the eighties I saw an RAF F4 Phantom (illegally I suspect) do a low-altitude supersonic flyby at an airshow in the UK. It was, I must confess, very exciting. At the same airshow, the USAF flew up a CH53, which was and probably still is the mightiest machine I have ever seen. The thing, which was HUGE, flew in at low altitude/high speed, went up vertically, dropped backwards (!) and just as we were all like OH SHIT, straightened out and landed. The aircrew were all walking archetypes of AMERICAN AIRMAN, it was just totally awesome in every way imaginable.

Not the loudest bang, but certainly one of the loudest noises I ever heard was a Harrier hovering a few metres about the ground at an airshow. It seemed a lot louder than a jet fly past, since it was a continuous wall of noise.

i was at a gwar show in philadelphia in 1988 or 1989 and they let off a huge explosive charge or something and i was right near the stage and it was so loud that i think i died and now i am actually a ghost. this was at revival a small-ish club because gwar weren't big enough yet to play the troc. that thing was WAY too big for that place. they should all be arrested even today.

the entire room jumped.

i think elvis got the wrong sr 71 pic there btw