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I had a tire burst a couple of years ago and was actually on my bike at the time :eek:. Fortunately I was approaching a stop sign on a relatively quiet street so my speed was pretty low. I shudder to think what would have happened if I had been going at a good clip. Glad you weren't on your bike!
My partner is a bike mechanic and I think he's done some permanent damage to his hearing with all the tubes he's heard pop. We were just talking about it this morning because a co-worker of his is recently back from Iraq and doesn't fill up tires to the right pressure because he gets upset over the gunshot noise if they explode.
It's easy to blow tires with a compressor if you're not careful. If you use a hand pump you can usually notice the tire starting to rise off the rim and have time to let some air out. At the shop I worked at in the 70s, we'd blow several tires every week. Some weeks we blew so many that when one mechanic headed for the compressor, the rest of us ran the other way. Where I work now we use hand pumps and I haven't had a single tire blow, though I've had some rise off the rim and had to let air out real fast. BTW, patched sewups can blow sometimes if the repair stitching isn't good enough.