Or more interestingly it may occur in very ordinary circumstances - the vacuum does not have to be even metastable. Think of an (idealized) pin standing on it's tip, on a glass plane. Suppose that whole thing is put on a moving train - for any train trajectory, there is an initial position for the pin so that it will not fall. That pin would seem to behave quite mysteriously - leaning back just before the train starts braking, etc - even though the equations of motion are very simple. Seems like a good way to specify apparently complicated behaviours compactly and elegantly.
(edit2: Rather than seeing it as worlds being destroyed, I'd see this as an mathematically elegant single world universe, or a mathematically elegant way to link quantum amplitudes to probabilities (which are the probabilities that the one surviving world will have such and such observations) )
Imagine that the universe is approximately as it appears to be (I know, this is a controversial proposition, but bear with me!). Further imagine that the many worlds interpretation of Quantum mechanics is true (I'm really moving out of Less Wrong's comfort zone here, aren't I?).
Now assume that our universe is in a situation of false vacuum - the universe is not in its lowest energy configuration. Somewhere, at some point, our universe may tunnel into true vacuum, resulting in a expanding bubble of destruction that will eat the entire universe at high speed, destroying all matter and life. In many worlds, such a collapse need not be terminal: life could go one on a branch of lower measure. In fact, anthropically, life will go on somewhere, no matter how unstable the false vacuum is.
So now assume that the false vacuum we're in is highly unstable - the measure of the branch in which our universe survives goes down by a factor of a trillion every second. We only exist because we're in the branch of measure a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of... all the way back to the Big Bang.
None of these assumptions make any difference to what we'd expect to see observationally: only a good enough theory can say that they're right or wrong. You may notice that this setup transforms the whole universe into a quantum suicide situation.
The question is, how do you go about maximising expected utility in this situation? I can think of a few different approaches: