‘Like a bomb went off,’ St. Augustine couple’s shower door explodes in middle of the night

Nov 02, 2024

Lori Bowling and her husband were both in bed Friday night, as they normally do when they were awoken by the same loud sound.

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“It was just the loudest sound that just woke you wide awake,” Bowling says.

The two live in a small neighborhood not far from St. Augustine Beach. It’s a gated community that usually stays quiet, part of the shock Bowling felt when she was jolted awake by something so unexpectedly loud.

“It sounded like an explosion. It sounded like a bomb went off,” says Bowling.

They thought someone had broken in, only to find it was something that had broken. They found one of the glass door panels of the shower in their guest bathroom shattered, spreading glass shards across the floor.

Bowling took a video of how she found her bathroom and uploaded it to TikTok. It now has hundreds of thousands of views. She says she still has no clue how the shower door could have shattered, and is hoping other homeowners are aware of the possibility.

“Immediately I started thinking ‘what if someone was in the shower,’” Bowling says, “‘What if someone was in the bathroom?’”

Action News Jax’s Finn Carlin called glass repair shops in Duval, Clay, and St. Johns counties. A St. Augustine store, Lee & Cates Glass, says it’s received calls about multiple shower doors shattering in just the last few months. Others like Gordon’s Glass & Mirror in Orange Park say it’s rarely heard of this happening.

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“Typically, they don’t just shatter for no reason,” says Kenny Bennett, shop operator of Gordon’s Glass & Mirror. He says in his 14 years at the shop, he’s only heard about glass shower doors exploding a total of 3 times.

Bennett says shower glass panels are tempered, which Georgia-based FGD Glass Solutions says is the exposure of glass to extreme heat to make it more durable and resistant to hot temperatures. Bennett says a glass panel would only explode because of a problem with how it was installed, rather than how it was designed.

“You have to hit it at a certain point or that glass has to be really stressed for it to just blow up in a million pieces,” Bennett says.

Regardless of the cause, Bowling says her next steps are clear as glass.

“I certainly won’t be using glass shower doors anymore, that’s for sure,” says Bowling, “the damage they could cause is more terrifying than the aesthetics of your house, in my opinion.”

The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates more than 131,000 people were hurt by glass shower doors and glass panels in their homes between 2019-2023. If you’re concerned about the safety of your showers, Bennett says they should be inspected by a professional if popping noises can be heard when opening and closing them.

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