I had a catastrophic tube failure this morning. Catastrophic particularly for me at least, as I went down pretty hard. Fortunately, I was just coming off a 4-way stop so I wasn't flying like I had been just minutes ago.
So the tire seems to have failed almost instantly but I don't recall hitting anything that might have damaged it and only minutes before I was clipping along at about a 20mph pace and nothing felt out of the ordinary. I got to a 4-way stop and there was auto traffic so I did stop and wait my turn. As there were cars waiting on me, I really mashed to get out of the intersection. And that's when I went down. It happened so fast I really didn't know what happened. My first thought was I hit a build up of gravel in the center and the front wheel just skid, because that's what it felt like. I looked and there was fine pea gravel in the intersection and I could see where the tire just pushed through it as I was going down.
But after I got clear of the intersection, I mounted the bike and that's when I felt the front tire was completely flat. I can't say it wasn't at least low before, but it certainly wasn't completely flat before that intersection.
Since I used my spare tube and CO2 charge earlier in the ride (talk about bad luck), I ended up walking the rest of the way. Fortunately, I was only a couple miles from the house when all this happened. Due to the previous puncture, I thought discretion was the better part of valor and cut my planned route short. Good thing too. If I had this failure on my originally planned route, I would have had to walk about 8 miles home.
When I got home, I pulled the tube out to see where the damage was and this is what I found.
There are about five splits like this right along this seam, ranging from about 1/8" to 1/2" in length, all within about a five inch length of the tube. This seam runs more on the inside of the rim so I don't think it was some kind of external insult. The tire is a near-new Gatorskin with no damage.
Is this just an age failure? I have several bikes that all run a 700x23c tire so between repairing punctures and swapping tubes/tires around, I have no idea how old this tube is. It is a Bontrager and I know I have never purchased a Bontrager tube before.