Anybody seen this before?
http://www.pei.org/static/index.htm
This sounded a bit suspicious to me- anybody know what the straight dope is on this?
That site claims that over 150 cases have been ‘documented’ where cars at filling stations went on fire because of static electricity. Snopes. com did a pretty good job clearing up the facts regarding the ‘don’t use cel phones at gas stations’ scare and this seems suspiciously similar.
I know that the road tankers that re-fill the storage tanks in filling stations are connected to an earth ( ground) point before they commence filling operations. I presume this is to prevent a static spark.
batsto, check your link.
Plastic truck-bed liners come with a warning sticker which says to NOT fill gas cans which are in the (plastic-lined) truck bed. Static electricity can cause fire in that circumstance.
There is a link with more information from the American Petroleum Institute and from snopes in this thread.
The working link:
http://www.pei.org/static/index.htm
That word appear makes the whole statement sound fishy, thus:
To date over 100,000 UFOs have been documented that appear to be of extraterrestrial origin.
Aside from being implied by the higher incident rates in winter months, I wonder what makes a fire “appear” to have been set off by a static electriciy discharge.
I notice that in my “state” there was one “apparent” incident since they started keeping records (1993). I wonder what percentage this would work out to:
1÷(total number of cars getting gas in DC since 1993)×100
A pretty damn small number would be my guess.
I believe it. I’ve driven many cars that give you a good healthy shock when you get out of the car. According to the car talk guys it’s not so much the fault of the car as it is the type of tires they use these days, but you can prevent it by adding a piece of metal braid to the bottom of the car so that it drags on the ground. With hundreds of thousands of people getting shocked every day, it’s not surprising that eventually a few of them are going to be refueling at the time, and a few of those will have managed to spill gasoline on the car while putting the nozzle in or some such.
The only picture I’ve seen where a cell phone supposedly started a gas pump fire looked to me like it was actually a static discharge and not at all related to the cell phone.
The cell phone thing has got to be just about impossible, but I can see a static discharge happening much more easily, elthough it would still be an extremely rare event. About 150 cases in the past few years out of the millions of cars on the road seems to be about the right ballpark for the frequency I’d expect for this sort of thing.
The fires reported on that PEI site weren’t being monitored by voltage-measuring devices, so how could they NOT say “apparently”? If you reach for the gas cap and it suddenly bursts into flame for no obvious reason, then the cause was almost certainly static electricity, but without observing the event with voltage-detection equipment you can’t really be certain.
Heh. The real cause of the fires is the car’s gascap-door release lever. If everyone was forced to touch that little metal door, then their bodies would already have been discharged by the time they reached for the gas cap within. If instead you use the lever inside the car to pop open the door, then you can climb out (becoming highly charged,) NOT bump the car or receive any painful zaps, then reach your charged hand towards the gas cap…
Another thought. Cars are only grounded if they are electrically connected to the Earth, and for that you need conductive tires (pretty normal), and conductive road surface. Dirty outdoor concrete is fairly conductive, but in the winter your car might be sitting on clean ice, and ice is nearly an insulator.
When you climb out of your car, tribo-charging between you and the car seat causes your body to become charged… but the car receives an opposite charge. Being much larger than you, the capacitance of the car is proportionally larger, so the voltage with respect to ground will be much smaller. Suppose someone was jamming the gasoline nozzle into the tank just when you exited the car? If you created 30KV on your body from climbing out, maybe the car receives several hundred volts. That might or might not be enough to make a spark which could start a fire. Now suppose you bump the grounded gas nozzle against metal just as six highly charged kids all pile out of your minivan? Zap! FOOOSH!