In what a neighbor of mine would call a “great moment in poor judgment”, a high school baseball coach in Ridgefield, CT, decided to dry a baseball diamond with 24 gallons of gasoline and a match. It went about as well as you’d expect: Ciuccoli Field repairs estimated to cost $50,000
Interestingly, apparently it’s been done before in other places.
I liked the final quote:
I’m still not clear on the concept here: they soaked the dirt with gasoline, then lit the gasoline on fire thinking that would somehow dry up the dirt??? Because water, what, burns?? :eek:
Perhaps they thought the heat from the burning gasoline would boil off the water?
It won’t chill beer, either.
I don’t feel we can assume thought was involved in this situation.
Hey, you put wet clothes in a hot dryer and it dries them out, no? Or you can dry things over the fire.
There are a number of basic physics principles that they overlooked here:
-Gasoline is lighter than water. If the soil is soaked with water, the gasoline will tend to stay on the surface of the soil. Any heat generated by burning it won’t penetrate far enough into the soil to heat it very much.
-Warm air rises. Again, most of the heat will be drawn upwards away from the soil.
-They failed to account for the sheer volume of water contained in the soil. The article says that they tried it out on a small area near third base and “it seemed to work.” In fact, you can probably dry small amounts of soil this way but to dry an entire infield you would need a tanker truck of gasoline.
-Worst of all, they assumed that all the gas would burn off and leave no residue. Of course, a lot of the gas penetrated the soil where it wouldn’t have enough oxygen to burn. So you ended up with a lot of gasoline soaked soil.
I’m waiting for the Farmer’s Insurance commercial. Maybe they could call it “The Blazing Diamond”.
So they just didn’t think big enough?
I just had a flashback - our Little League tried this once. Okay, it helped that our infields are like softball infields, and don’t have any grass in them.
My assumption is that this infield did not have grass, either. I figured that out from something said in the article.
I’m sure that it doesn’t have grass now.
I think “scorched earth” doesn’t mean what they thought it meant.
Slate posted about this incident today. It includes a short video of the field on fire, and some history of this brilliant method. And evidently cat litter isn’t so great either; the groundskeeper for the Orioles recommends something called Puddle Sponges.