One Big Firework
One hot and humid day in the middle of May, I was returning from a trip in southern Georgia.  We came to the northern part of South Carolina, so we just had to stop at the Fireworks Supermarket and buy the good fireworks; the ones that are illegal in Virginia and North Carolina. While we were browsing the selection of firecrackers and bottle-rockets, I glanced down to the end of the aisle. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw a 162 shot Roman candle sitting there for five dollars. Being the kind of person who is not satisfied with a 20 shot Roman candle, I had to have it. After many similar discoveries, I had a shopping cart full of everything from sparklers to big mortars that were guaranteed to set off every car alarm within 2 miles. We paid for our purchases and then decided to go eat while we were still in town. We pulled off, on our way to Cook-Out when we were almost hit by a transfer truck with one of those ribbed tanks that hold pressurized chemicals and poisons.
We dismissed it as nothing and continued to the restaurant and ate. We were ready to get back on the road by then so we made our way back to Interstate 95. We drove for several uneventful hours until we reached mile marker 157, when we were stopped by traffic. I looked up the highway, and saw a transfer truck wrecked into an overpass. I turned on my fire lights and drove up the median to approximately three hundred yards from the accident.  I then used my binoculars to see orange fumes seeping from a breach on the trailer. I then realized it was the same truck that had almost hit me. The driver of the truck saw me and came from a car where he was talking with a man he apparently knew, after using his phone to call emergency services. He then proceeded to tell me that his truck was hauling fifty thousand pounds of nitrating acid, and that I needed to evacuate everyone near the accident. Thinking back to my hazardous materials class that I had just taken, I realized that his statement was an extreme litote. That much nitrating acid could kill every man, woman, and child that happened to breathe in the toxic gas. I sent my friends that were riding with me to direct traffic to the off ramp and onto another highway, until the police arrived. We had started moving the vehicles that were between the incident and the off ramp back when a sufficiently trained man arrived to take further action. While waiting for the State HAZMAT team I began to become increasingly sick to my stomach. Thinking that it was the food I had ate earlier in the day, I dismissed it as nothing.
By the time I realized I had been exposed to the gas while talking to the truck driver, I was lying on the ground bleeding from my mouth, nose and ears. When I woke up I was lying in a hospital bed in Greenville, North Carolina, surrounded by my friends and my parents. They said that I had been exposed to twice the lethal limit of the poison, and that I should have died on the side of 95. My response was that the truck driver was just fine and that he had been exposed to much more than I had. They told me that within twenty minutes of talking to me, the truck driver and everyone in the car that had stopped beside were pronounced dead by emergency services, and that the only reason I had not heard was because I was in the group of HAZMAT personnel and the firefighters that I had trained with in another fire class. I was told that if I had had any kind of cold or sinus infection that my lungs would have completely dissolved, leaving me to slowly suffocate.
After recovering from my ordeal, I saw a report of the incident in a newspaper saying that I had saved over two thousand lives that day, not on the highway, but in a baseball stadium full of spectators. It said that without me alerting the emergency services, by the time anyone thought about the ball game, every single person would have inhaled lethal doses. I made a resolution that day; I was not going to any ball games, or road trips to South Carolina anytime in the foreseeable future, and I also keep a Hazardous Materials Guidebook in my truck, right beside a gasmask for any random encounters with truck drivers.