GENDER REVEAL FAILS
Boy, girl... or trail of death and disaster?
Since 2011 or thereabouts, parties at which parents dramatically reveal the biological sex of their unborn children have become increasingly popular in the US. Originally fairly modest, involving cakes that were revealed to be pink or blue when cut, or releases of coloured balloons, the actual reveals have become ever more spectacular as time has passed. The skills of the party hosts, however, have not always matched their ambition, with what some would say are predictable results. One such party fail resulted in Anthony Spinelli of Kingston, New Hampshire, being fined for disorderly conduct after he decided the best way to reveal the sex of his forthcoming child was to detonate 80lb (36kg) of Tannerite, an explosive normally used as a target for firearms practice and sold over the counter in the US. Despite choosing a secluded quarry for his child’s explosive debut, the detonation led to minor structural damage to local houses and reports to police of an explosion from across a wide area of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. At least in this case, no one died.
Not so lucky was Christopher Pekny, 28, of Liberty, New York. He did not even get as far as the party. He was preparing for a
“It was the freakiest of freak accidents that I could imagine”
spectacular reveal by building what was essentially a powerful pipe bomb, which exploded prematurely, killing Pekny and seriously injuring his brother Michael. Their younger brother Peter told the New York Times that it was “the freakiest of freak accidents that I could ever imagine,” but regrettably it was not completely unprecedented.
Only two weeks before, Evan Thomas Silver, 26, had been killed by a piece of shrapnel that struck his chest when a small cannon fired at a gender reveal party in Michigan burst, and in 2019 Iowa grandmother Pamela Kreimeyer died instantly when a chunk of metal from a gender reveal explosion hit her head.
The force of the blast was so strong that the piece of metal ended up 144 yards (132m) away. However, a teenage father-to-be in Chapel Hill, Tennessee, had a lucky escape: he was struck in the crotch by debris from a hand-held smoke cannon but avoided serious injury.
Further fatal gender reveal mayhem took place in Nichupte Lagoon off Cancun, Mexico, where the climax of a gender reveal boat party was meant to be the flypast of a plane trailing a banner saying, “It’s a girl!”; but the plane nose-dived into the bay, for as yet undetermined reasons, killing both the pilot and copilot. The crew of another plane were lucky to escape with their lives when it crashed near the town of Turkey in Texas, close to the Oklahoma border. They had been carrying out a low-altitude flight to drop 350 gallons (1,325 litres) of pink water for a gender reveal when the sudden loss of weight following the liquid being released caused the plane to stall, slam into the ground and flip over. The crew suffered only minor injuries.
Gender reveals have been responsible for at least two major
US wildfires. In Tucson, Arizona, father-to-be Dennis Dickey decided that the best way to reveal his child’s sex was to blow up a Tannerite target, despite the dry conditions in the area. The explosion ignited a fire that destroyed 45,000 acres (182km2) of the Green Valley National Forest and caused at least $8 million of damage. The El Dorado forest fire in California in 2020 also resulted from a gender reveal explosion, burning 22,000 acres (89km2) and killing a firefighter, resulting in the unhappy couple Refugio Manuel Jimenez Jr and Angela Renee Jimenez being charged with involuntary manslaughter. These make the gender reveal fail in Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, look positively restrained. There, a misfiring device that was meant to produce a cloud of coloured smoke exploded instead and burned half a hectare (1.2 acres) of forest, resulting in a $600 fine for the family. And just to show that the US doesn’t have a monopoly on gender reveal madness, Samuel Montesalvo decided to make the reveal by doing a tyrespinning burnout on a road in Australia’s Gold Coast using special blue smoking tyres. Unfortunately, this also set fire to the car and Montesalvo and his passenger had to be rescued by bystanders. He ended up being charged with dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, fined AUS $1,000 (£543) and banned from driving for six months.
However, the person credited with starting the gender reveal craze back in 2008, Jenna Karvunidis, now regrets doing so, saying: “It’s all become a bit of a nightmare.” She added that she felt responsible and cried after hearing of the El Dorado fire. On viewing clips of extravagant reveals, including the alligator, she said: “People should definitely stop doing that… I think a lot of people out there are searching for likes on the Internet and it has caused a lot of problems, people should be a little bit more responsible with the parties. Throw a different type of party — like what’s the baby’s name? There are many more possibilities with that than whether or not it has a penis.” theguardian.com, 29 Jun 2020, rollingstone.com, 20 Aug 2020; patch.com, 25 Feb; todaysparent. com, 5 May; prospectmagazine. co.uk, 20 May; nypost.com, 11 Jun 2019, 17 May 2021.