You're right, you were lucky. Kids who do stuff sometimes die. Life is a deeply, profoundly unfair thing, in ways that cannot be fixed. If you want to have a life worth living, you have to do stuff, but that entails risk that something terrible might happen. I was tempted to say "but that doesn't mean you should take stupid risks like playing with gasoline" but then I realized even that was wrong. We took away chemistry sets and only later did somebody ask a bunch of scientists what got them interested in science, and it seems like quite a few of them say things like "burning/blowing stuff up."
http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html
"Vint Cerf – who became one of the architects of the Internet – spent months blowing up thermite volcanoes and launching backyard rockets. Growing up in Colorado, David Packard – the late cofounder of Hewlett-Packard – concocted new recipes for gunpowder. The neurologist Oliver Sacks writes about his adolescent love affair with “stinks and bangs” in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. “There’s no question that stinks and bangs and crystals and colors are what drew kids – particularly boys – to science,” says Roald Hoffmann of Cornell University, who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1981. “Now the potential for stinks and bangs has been legislated out.”"
Maybe you don't get these great people if you remove their freedom to explore in their formative years. But that freedom also meant a bunch of kids blew their hands off or worse, and if your kid dies in a gasoline accident, it's your fault as a parent and nobody says "well he just wanted his kid to be Nobel Prize material, valiant effort." It's unfair, but reality doesn't care. All you can possibly change is the societal attitude, not the actual fact that freedom means some unsupervised kids always are gonna die and it might be yours.