OK, I saw this covered on Mythbusters and thought it was settled. Now I find this on FARK:
Phone Ignites Gas Station Fire
Now, I’m not a pyrotechnician, electrical engineer or gas pump technician, but what’s the story here? Did the phone really start the fire, as the New Paltz Fire Chief claims? Or, did the college student fail to discharge before starting to pump gas and then spark some other way?
Can you honestly ignite a gas fire with a cell phone?
There’s not enough information in the article to say. I’ve seen one other case where a gas pump fire was blamed on a cell phone, but in this case there were pics from a surveillance camera. It was fairly clear from the pics that the guy had the phone in his right hand up to his ear, and touched the car near the gas cap area with his left hand, which caused a spark.
While it is possible that the cell phone did indeed cause the pump fire, this generally requires a malfunction of some type in the cell phone. It’s much more likely that a simple static discharge was to blame, but the person happened to be holding a cell phone at the time, so the phone gets blamed.
Static discharges cause about 150 pump fires per year, IIRC, which is a pretty small number considering how many millions of people use the pumps every day. I’ve never seen a documented case of a cell phone starting a pump fire.
Source: Petroleum Equipment Institute