Darwin Award Hopeful

[RavenStarr]

the story did say that they experimented with petrol fumes, and one of my friends (who did a film course and smokes) tried to light petrol fumes with a cigarette for one of his films and found that he could not without heating it up first.

Your friend sounds like another Darwin Award Hopeful. Also why would a person take such a big risk? I was told a long time ago that all it takes is one spark or one flick of cigerette ashes not even directly on petrol but near it to start a raging inferno. Now maybe it won't happen every time, but why would one be so stupid as to take that risk.

[Tama]

There was a guy like this on World's Dumbest.

"Nelson" was a welder by trade and driving his van to work one day. He decided he needed a cigarette...

His van of highly flammable welding materials BLEW UP.


And he was FINE. He sat on the curb waiting for the cops/FD.

[Andara Bledin]

The same goes for mobile phones. Tho the main risk is if you drop your phone (metal striking on ground equals spark plus vapour equals boom), that still doesn't mean you can come into the petrol station bleating, "But I saw it on Top Gear/Science Abuse/insert other TV programme here!"

If that were the case, we'd have to ban keys... There's more plastic in phones than metal. You're more likely to spontaneously combust than for your cell phone to start a fire in a gas station.

The biggest identifiable danger when dealing with gasoline fumes is static electricity, and I'm not sure there's any real way to avoid that other than to avoid the types of clothes most likely to generate it, and make sure your shoes can ground. And never get back into your car while the gas is pumping, and never top off when you fill your tank.

^-.-^

[Shalom]

This is just wild-donkey speculation, but I think the ban on cell phone use in gas stations is more because it's technically a two-way radio, and those have been banned in gas stations (and at construction sites where blasting is done) since at least the 1970s. I remember hearing this exact same argument 34 years ago, except then they were arguing whether keying the mic on your CB whilst fueling would cause your car to blow up or not... My guess is that even that argument was older than CB's in private cars; if someone was foolish enough to put a high-power Ham rig in his car, say on the order of hundreds of watts, perhaps that might have been a fire hazard.

(Those of you who are old enough to remember having to wire your own power mikes for CBs may remember the difference between electronic and relay T/R switching. If your CB (like mine) was relay switched, there's a possibility that a spark might have been generated when going into transmit mode, but unless you were pumping the gas into the passenger compartment instead of the tank, I doubt anything would have happened.)

[dalesys]

And let us not forget: The First Correction (Of Murphy's Law)

Murphy was a blithering optimist!

[Lace Neil Singer]

Whether it makes sense or not, tis the rule. After all, you can always come into the shop and make your call there.

[Justsomegirl]

There too huh.

I husband use to work at a gas station. The one time the daughter was gasing up the car and mom opend up the other door and started smoking. So my husband went out to ask "mom" to put out the cigaret and not only was she smoking near the gas pumps but she was ON OXYGEN too!!

[Magpie]

Guy who uses his oxygen while welding. A spark hit the tubing and it (obviously) burned in a flash.

"Why would they use such flammable materials for the tubing?"

He honestly didn't get it.