When US Border Patrol agent Dennis Dickey decided to reveal the gender of his soon-to-be-born baby to family and friends in an explosive fashion, he never imagined that his stunt would spark a 45,000 acre wildfire, but that’s exactly what it did.
The 37-yer-old Border Patrol agent planned to fire a shotgun at a target that would explode with either pink or blue powder, thus revealing the gender of his unborn child. There were a few things he didn’t really think through, though. First, he packed the target with a legal but highly explosive compound called Tannerite, for a more dramatic effect, and he also chose to place that target among dry grasses and mesquite trees. When Dickey fired his shotgun, blue smoke exploded from the target, revealing that his child was a boy, but there was no time to celebrate, as the explosion immediately ignited the surrounding the dry plants.
