Skivving off one morning, I went shopping with my wages from my Saturday job and decided to go into school for the afternoon. As I was stingy with my wages, I decided to walk the long road past a building with a car park surrounded by a half height brick wall. Heard a revving noise and the wall exploded with a car emerging through it about six inches from me. I stepped around it, muttered 'smashing' and continued walking to school. Turned out that the man inside (it made the local rag without my presence being noted) that when the people at the bus stop the other side ran over, he was somebody who had just found out he was being prosecuted for domestic violence and had decided to go out in a blaze of glory by driving into the wall whilst several gallons of petrol were beside him on the front passenger seat. He hadn't allowed for the wall being about 80 years old and collapsing, rather than providing what he needed for a huge explosion.
School Leavers' Party on the Marchioness on a Saturday evening. For some reason, I felt scared on the lower deck where the music was and as it began a wide, sweeping turn, I decided Stuff This, This Feels Wrong and sat upstairs where I could see what was going on (and be first off the thing when it docked) for the rest of the evening. The following weekend, I woke up to hear it had sunk and later than it had been hit at what sounded exactly like the moment I had decided a week ago that wasn't safe.
Age 16, riding pillion on the boyfriend's Dad's moped. He stopped at a roundabout, knowing with the two of us, he didn't have enough oomph to pull out in front of cars going straight across, West to East. The woman behind us assumed his movement wasn't him putting his foot down, it was him about to pull away, so floored her accelerator so she could make it across as well. I flew up and forwards and landed with my feet on the roundabout's kerb and, as the back of my head hit the tarmac, I looked up to see the underside of the car come to a halt over me. Fortunately, we were just along the road from a hospital and an ambulance crew were approaching the roundabout as it all happened, so within seconds, they were there as I was kicking, screaming and generally losing my shit under there. They stayed with me at the hospital for hours as I wasn't actually badly hurt but couldn't stop shaking (I was about 7 stone wringing wet, so probably looked like I was even younger) and once I calmed down, admitted that it was so close as I landed, they had thought they were about to watch me literally have my head taken off.
Probably 85% of all trips in cars with boyfriends in my 20s were dicing with death as they were arseholes, would hide having been drinking/smoking weed/etc and because I did neither, I didn't have a clue.
I had a fridge freezer go bang and send out great clouds of smoke whilst it was red hot at the back. One of the ones that were later blamed for several fires. I was walking past the kitchen as it went, so quickly opened the electricity cupboard door and cut everything off. The company refused to accept there was an issue as it was out of warranty. fucking Beko
Ex's wiring skills were so 'bad' despite working in health and safety , an electrician repaired the live wires touching metal backplates and switches for free. Coincidentally, he'd known I had free life insurance and a massive Accidental Death in Service add on through my job. He didn't know I'd nominated a Trust Fund for the children on advice from the staff member responsible for enrolling me - the staff member said he would refuse to take nominations for unmarried partners where there were children. I called the electrician not because of an actual fault, but because I thought I could hear and smell something was wrong somewhere.
Moved into a house where the apprentice must have wired the kitchen after the sparks had gone home on a Friday afternoon. The cooker wire was a standard domestic cable and pinned underneath the element, where it melted. Once everything was taken out, the hardwiring hadn't been tightened, so the domestic rated cable was just poked into the slots and the dedicated breaker wasn't connected. The only thing that tripped was the entire fuse box, not the dedicated one. I was very glad of the original electrician fitting the consumer unit and the wiring regulations that meant there was still one last point after three separate points had failed due to incompetence. Where the cable had melted through, had that final layer of protection failed or been fitted by the twat that did the last bit, it would have been sending electricity directly through the metal oven body.
And one last one. I lived in a top floor flat on the top of a hill almost overlooking a small airfield used by private jets and the like. I wasn't keen on this after several years, as more and more seemed to fly directly over the block instead of using the official route of across woodland/a rural area nearby (in flight terms). One Sunday, we were sitting eating a late lunch with the balcony doors open and there was a really loud plane that I could tell was incredibly low - I shot out onto the balcony to see into the cockpit of a private jet go past just above the roof (the chimney pots were shattered and fell into the hearth). It sounded 'wrong' so I watched as it continued on its way. It finally went out of sight, so I turned to go inside, back to my food and looked out of the window to see a huge plume of black smoke in the distance. The jet has crashed into some houses near the airfield. I cringed every time a plane flew over after that and finally moved to where I am - where no planes are allowed due to nearby high rise buildings.
I figure that if something dramatically awful is going to happen, it will and there is nothing anybody can do about it. But the little voice that says 'this isn't right' needs to be listened to.