Around 2:30 this afternoon, I was sitting in the living room of Mukat's house, reading LJ, when I heard a loud bang from the bathroom. I jumped up and went to look, thinking the cat had knocked something over. Everything looked normal, until I noticed the bathroom cabinet seemed... low. It normally looks like this (this is the cabinet in the other bathroom) [link]
but it seemed to be sitting right on the toilet.

Then, it slid to the right, slamming into the top of the litter box, resting on the side of the countertop, and the back of the toilet exploded like a party cracker, sending chunks of porcelain flying. About two seconds after the huge cabinet dropped over, water began to gush from three places in the back piping stuff, hitting the floor and the wall.

Within a minute, the floor was filling up with water fast.

I grabbed the nearby towels and tried to dam up the doorway, to keep the water on the tile and off the hardwood floor, but there was so much water that it started to flow through. I couldn't reach the shut off valve on the back of the toilet because the cabinet was still in the way. While I was trying to figure out how to move the thing, it suddenly fell again, coming right at me. I lunged out of the way, thinking the glass would shatter and cut me, but it slammed into the floor and the glass remained intact, although the doors flew open and dumped the contents across the floor.

Now that the cabinet was out of the way, I began moving the chunks of porcelain in order to reach the valve. The water was, at this point, all around my ankles and flowing over the towels into the hall. Once I could reach the valve, I tried to turn it, but nothing happened. It was stuck, rusted shut. I called Mukat, telling him I needed him to come home right away, asking how to turn off the main water supply to the house. He didn't know, so he called his mother, who began rushing home as well.

While I was waiting, I ran next door, hoping to find someone who knew anything about plumbing or where the shut-off valve in a suburban home would be (our pumphouse/well set up at home has made me useless with city plumbing). One neighbor wasn't home, and the other looked blankly at me and said, "I don't know anything about plumbing." Almost apologetically, she added, "Because I'm a girl?" which made me die a little inside.

I ran back to the house, determined to strong arm the valve. Using a towel and pretty much falling over in the process, I managed to turn the damned thing. After that, I grabbed every towel in the house, slowly herding the water back into the bathroom. It had run under the door into Mukat's parents' bedroom, and under the wall into their bath. It's apparently also gone under the wall into the laundry room. I kept it away from the giant heating/cooling unit in the hall closet, though, which is worth something, I guess.

Mukat arrived, and we vacuumed the water out using a shop vac. When his mother arrived, she called a plumber and her insurance company. The plumber came and replaced the toilet (for about $600). I am still wet and I am very, very cold. But the water is gone, and the tile is getting cleaned, so it's all winding down.

Here is the room during the shop-vacuuming. I never really noticed how freakishly large that cabinet was, until it came flying at my head:
[link]

Warriors from the army of towels:
[link]

The damage done to the back of the toilet:
[link]

Here's the chunk of porcelain from the back of the toilet I had to move:
[link]

The gouge out of the litter box where the cabinet hit it, and just general cabinet carnage:
[link]

Here's the hardwood floor in the hallway, already warping because it's too saturated with water and set too close together:
[link]

Since the cabinet is set on the wall with a catch system to prevent it from being knocked off the wall, we couldn't figure out why it fell. Mukat's mother suggested the cat, but we rattled the one in their bath, and it never even budged, so there's no way a five pound kitten can knock something wider than two of me off of two mounted brackets.

Then, I found out that this morning, there was a 5.2 earthquake in Illinois that was felt as far as our town here in Tennessee, so I am convinced that either the quake or its 4.6 aftershock knocked the thing loose and it fell on its own later.