Dodging a bullet

I previously mentioned the Gigantic Christmas Turkey O'Doom.  Yesterday evening, I started making stock from the picked carcass.  Said carcass was big enough that it had to go into the pressure cooker in two batches.  The first batch of bones and scraps went in last night, got pressure cooked for about three hours, then probably another four hours today.  I decanted it (probably about three quarts of stock) and loaded up the second batch of bones and scraps right before I fixed the girls lunch.  Lunch du jour was quesadillas, and for once, all three of them ate their lunches (even without complaint).  I'd just started to get stuff out for my lunch when the pressure cooker came back up to pressure.  I turned the heat down, went over to the dining room door for some reason as I heard it start to settle down behind me, then suddenly, WHOOOOOOOOOOOSH, there was a roar and hiss of live steam, and the whole cooktop area vanished in a yellow haze.

It was immediately obvious that the pressure cooker had vented; examination showed that apparently I had somehow managed to not get the silicone-rubber rim gasket seated properly when I put the lid back on, and a two-inch loop of gasket had blown out between the lid and the rim.  (I'm not clear quite how this happened, but it's clear that it did; neither of the pressure safety vents blew.)  Previously under two atmospheres of pressure, the water that was just beginning to turn into stock flash-boiled when the pressure was suddenly reduced to only one.  All but about an inch of the stock-to-be ended up either flashed to steam or sprayed violently around that side of the kitchen.

The good news is no-one was standing next to it when it let go, or whoever it was would probably have been badly scalded.

Two and a half hours of cleanup later, the kitchen is clean again, and the second batch of stock is back on (after a quick test run up to high pressure with nothing but an inch of clear water in the pressure cooker).  I'm bushed.  And I never got my lunch.

The only real casualties were a couple of receipts and the like that got instantly saturated in the spray of stock-to-be.  cymrullewes' classic French cookery book got a pretty good steam blasting, too, but appears to have recovered aside from a few wrinkled pages; the steam soaked the open pages immediately, but evaporated dry almost as fast leaving little trace of its passing.