When I was in high school in the late 80's - early 90's and I worked at a supermarket, we'd make these every now and again, out of dry ice from the ice-cream shipments, and chuck them in the trash compactors to muffle the noise a bit.
(The other thing we'd do is "skate" on the dry ice. We'd prop a pair of boots on the dry ice in the freezer so they'd get cold enough on the soles to stop sublimating the dry ice for a few seconds, then try to "skate" on the blocks, you could usually go a few frictionless feet, if you didn't break your tailbone. Which was fine, because that few seconds was about all your feet could stand in the boots&)
I was a lowly bag-boy, but I took every odd job they offered as an excuse to roam the store, so I got to witness lots of the warehouse shenanigans&
When the managers would come running to see what the boom was, the stockers always had a convenient excuse of some pallet "slapping" the floor really loudly, or they'd say the forklift accidentally popped a 2 liter of soda.
There was a rather nerdy dumb-ass kid who was also a bag-boy (and no, I'm not referring to myself in the third person suddenly) who just had to make one for himself. He used a 1 liter seltzer bottle from the damaged goods pile, and dumped about a pound of cracked dry ice into it. Then he chucked it into the recycled cardboard compactor.
He then went into the compactor to get it when it hadn't gone off for a few minutes. The stockers were screaming at him to get out of the compactor which is a huge no-no, obviously. But he came forth with the dry-ice bomb hanging from his fingers by the cap, and then the stockers started screaming at him to drop the bomb, as it was on it's "terminal swelling" right before it would burst.
T H U M P!
This was the first dry-ice bomb to ever go off without being contained in the dumpster. It made all the glass sliding doors at the other end of the 25,000 sqft store jiggle as the shockwave hit them.
He had a 1 foot long hematoma on his thigh next to where the bottle was dangling from his hand. Half his hand was a blood-blister, one broken finger, and the web between his thumb and index finger was torn down to the joint, and he was temporarily deaf.
Amazingly, THEY DIDN'T FIRE HIM! I guess they were afraid of a lawsuit for improper supervision or some such&
They did start making the ice cream distributor take the dry ice with them after the shipments though, ending our fun.
We had to resort to playing football on the roof through the jimmied access hatch, and "light saber" fights under the high tension lines behind the store with spare fluorescent tubes which made them glow...
