Some people, including me, still think of showers as spooky places after having seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho 55 years ago. To this day, when I grab and close the shower curtain, I flash back to that shocking murder scene with its shriek-shriek-shriek soundtrack. I don’t get scared, but I think of it.
Well, there’s a new reason to think of showers as dangerous places – not a movie-scene reason, but a real-life scary reason: exploding shower doors.
Don’t laugh; it’s true.
The other day my sister, Mary, emailed me that her shower door had just exploded.
I laughed, until I read on and realized she wasn’t kidding.
She’d been in the kitchen when she heard a very loud explosion, like a bomb. She ran toward the sound, the bathroom on the first floor. She opened the door and there stood her husband, naked as a jay bird, his mouth and eyes wide open with utter shock and surprise. He was standing in the tub. The rest of the bathroom looked like there had been a major car crash in it: blasted beads of glass everywhere, on and in the toilet, on the vanity counter, in the toothbrush cups and even under the door on the hallway carpet.
Thankfully, Mary’s husband wasn’t injured. The glass exploded away from him. But Mary has been thinking with fear ever since: “What if my little granddaughter had been standing in the bathroom when that happened?”
Mary called the Kohler Co., which manufactured the very expensive door, and told a customer rep. about it.
“Yes, that’s exactly how it should have functioned,” he cheerfully, stupidly reassured her.
“What?!” she asked, disgusted. “You mean to tell me the shower door is supposed to explode?!”
He told her no, but that when an explosion does happen, the glass disintegrates into small beads, as in car accidents, rather than jagged shards that could cut a person to shreds. Small comfort, that. Such blasting beads could blind a person and pock-mark a body pretty quickly, I would think.
I did some research on the Internet. Shower doors can shatter even if nobody is in the shower or anywhere near it. One report claims between 1978 and 2012, 22 people died because of exploding shower doors. Many others have been cut and injured, including 12-year-old Camden Roy of Dallas, whose mother heard a loud explosion followed by screams one day. She ran up to the bathroom and saw her son, bleeding and in utter terror, trying to climb the shower wall to get away from the horror as blood ran down the drain, just like in Psycho. Thank goodness the child survived.
In the past three years, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has received nearly 200 reports of shattering shower doors. Many incidents, of course, go unreported.
Here’s what causes the explosions, according to a glass expert named Mark Meshulam: The glass in shower doors is tempered glass, manufactured by alternately heating it and cooling it to make it extremely durable, almost impossible to break with even hammer blows. The tempering also prevents the glass from shattering into pointy, truly dangerous shards. Trouble is, the shower door’s glass sheet can also develop extreme escalation of tension, much like earthquake plates, between its inner and outer layers, to the point it can become a ticking time bomb. What can trigger the shattering and/or explosion are small cracks or chips, the door sliding on the metal runner rather than on its proper track or even a microscopic stone that got trapped in it during manufacturing.
Here’s what safety “experts” (I use the term loosely) recommend: Check shower doors for cracks or chips, especially around the edges; make sure the top and bottom of the door is sliding smoothly against the bumpers, not against the metal tracks; double-check that any devices attached to the door (such as towel racks) are installed properly, or better yet, put such devices elsewhere.
I’m no safety expert, but as a person with a sudden fear of exploding shower doors, I would hasten to add these tips: When doing safety checks or while showering, wear rubber boots, protective goggles, a football helmet and maybe even a steel-reinforced athletic supporter.
Or better yet, do as I do. No shower door for me, thank you. I’m sticking to my cheap, cheesy, vinyl-plastic, spooky old Psycho shower curtain.
