Family blows up apartment spraying for roaches. The roaches survive

As if we needed a reminder that the cockroaches will outlive us all.

A man in Asbury Park, N.J. sprayed Raid around his aparment on Wednesday night to kill the roaches.

When he started to get a headache from the fumes he opened a window. Unfortunately for him, the pilot light was lit on the stove.

Boom.

“You had the right mixture of three elements: The chemical, the oxygen and the ignition source,” Garrett M. Giberson, a spokesman for the city fire department, told Patch.com

“They sprayed a tremendous amount of Raid. There was so much chemical in the air that the introduction of oxygen just caused an explosion right away.”

When firefighters arrived they found the apartment's windows blown out and the front door bent from the force of the blast.

The explosion might have been prevented if the man had opened the window before he sprayed, Giberson said. But the real cause of the blast was spraying Raid so close to the stove and pilot light, he said.

“You should never spray a chemical near an open flame,” Giberson told reporters.

The two adults and a toddler inside the apartment at the time were taken to the hospital.

“The tenants are lucky because they could have been seriously injured,” Giberson told the Asbury Park Press.

The blasted roaches survived too.

“The unit was infested with roaches,” he said. “When I got on scene I saw numerous roaches crawling throughout the apartment.”