On all the best Discovery Channel shows, the hosts always say the same thing before they do something cool: "Kids, don't try this at home!" Apparently, they need to send a memo to adults as well, because John Gomes of Cohoes, New York didn't see any way building a makeshift barrel-forge in his backyard to make a sword could go wrong.

On November 30, 2017, Gomes was inspired by an episode of Forged in Fire on the History Channel to forswear the inflated prices of his local mall sword store and make his own. Sure, he didn't have any of the equipment to do it, but what he did have was an apartment with a backyard and a steel barrel in it, and that's just as good, right? Unfortunately, it was a rather windy afternoon and he couldn't get the fire hot enough, so he moved the barrel closer to the building. The steel barrel full of fire. To the wood structure. Because it was windy.

Obviously, the building caught on fire, and because of that stubborn wind, it quickly spread across town. In the end, 28 buildings were destroyed or damaged, and the resulting cloud of smoke was so dense and massive that it appeared on the radar of the National Weather Service. Miraculously, no one was hurt, but a lot of businesses and families were left homeless, so Gomes's neighbors had plenty of reason to be salty. He pled down to a year in jail and more than $620,000 in restitution, so now he really can't afford a sword.

In 2019, Sadie Renee Johnson was a 23-year-old Oregon woman who just wanted to help her friends. They happened to be firefighters, and they were starting to find the long shifts sitting around the firehouse tedious. Johnson interpreted this as "Please start a fire for us."

When she subsequently threw some fireworks out the window of a moving car into the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, she only meant to cause a little fire. You know, just a quick spray job to break up the monotony. But the fireworks lit up the brush along the roadside and expanded northwest, and soon, 51,480 acres of brush and timber were burning. It caused an estimated $7.9 million in damage and took the firefighters more than a month to fully put out the fire.?

Even though her plan hadn't gone quite as she'd hoped, Johnson resolved to look on the blindingly bright side. After two days, she took to Facebook, asking her friends "Like my fire?" because she wasn't just gonna not take credit for getting her brawny hero friends off their lazy asses. Unfortunately, Johnson's foresight isn't as strong as her can-do spirit, and the Facebook post left little room for interpretation to the police. She was ordered to spend 18 months in prison and pay restitution of at least $50 a month until she's paid the full price of the damages, which would take over 13,000 years. Just a lifelong, $50-per-month obnoxiousness tax.

James Scott of Quincy, Illinois lived to party, but his wife was just, like, totally cramping his style, man. One day in 1993, according to his friends, he decided to get rid of the broad, at least temporarily. Having spent some time volunteering on the levees that held back the tempestuous Mississippi River, he knew it would only take a few misplaced sandbags and tarps to put a wall of water between him and the Missouri truck stop where his wife was working and buy himself a few days of freedom. He wasn't wrong.

And he would have been able to enjoy them if he'd just kept his mouth shut. He immediately showed up on the TV news claiming that he'd been working on the levees when he noticed the breach and tried to stop it. He's stuck by that story, but authorities couldn't help but notice that he looked awfully clean for a man who'd supposedly been mucking about in the Mississippi. Their suspicions deepened when they found out the point where the levee broke, which had been inspected and declared safe only two hours before the incident, was considered its strongest point. When Scott's friends told them that he'd later bragged about causing the flood, those suspicions hit seabed. Scott was swiftly arrested, becoming the only person ever convicted in Missouri for intentionally causing a catastrophe. He and his wife are now divorced.