There are plenty of people who suffer from a debilitating fear of spiders, or arachnophobia, as the experts call it. While many people will admit that big hairy spiders are certainly creepy looking, fearing them is irrational considering how harmless their venom is to the human body. Despite this, people will go to great lengths to avoid encounters with scary-looking spiders, and when they are encountered, arachnophobes will do anything to be rid of them. In fact, one California man recently destroyed a large portion of his apartment building after using a blowtorch to kill a spider. As a result of the ensuing fire, the apartment building had to be evacuated.
As a consequence of trying to destroy a large wolf spider with a blowtorch, a fire ensued in one man’s apartment unit, putting all other tenants in mortal danger. Before the fire department arrived to put out the blaze, desperate apartment tenants struggled in vain to put out the fire with a nearby garden hose. The fire was serious enough to cause destruction to much of the complex, and it took firefighters 20 minutes to put out the fire. The property damaged caused by the fire will cost at least 11,000 dollars to restore, and this figure is not counting the personal property destroyed in the blaze. Luckily, none of the tenants were injured in the fire, but it goes without saying that the tenants resent the man’s actions, as he could have killed everyone in the building as a result of his panicked response to one single spider. Amazingly, this is not the first instance of a person destroying their home while attempting to kill a spider by means of fire. Last year, a resident of Arizona also used a blowtorch to eradicate spiders from his mobile home. The man was torching every spider web in sight before a fire ignited and quickly grew out of control. As a result of the fire, an elderly woman was injured, but luckily survived. In this case, it took 20 firefighters to put out the blaze, which lasted for a period of eleven minutes. There is no word on whether or not the spider in each case survived the ill-conceived extermination attempts.
Have you ever resorted to a creative method of killing an unwanted spider within your home?