Truck tire explosion

On our way home yesterday on a thousand-mile ride from northern Michigan to Philadelphia we had a very scary incident. As I was passing a loaded semi-trailer in western Pennsylvania and was even with its back wheel the tire on the truck exploded. The noise was intense; the chunk of the tire hitting our van nearly knocked us sideways. Wow.

Now I read that this kind of problem is deadly and that we were very lucky - nothing really happened to us or the van. But I'll tell you, each time I passed a truck for the remaining 300 miles home I was really nervous.