Nice guy, nice family…but I’m wondering about his mind ever since the following incident occurred:
I smelled something awful coming from his driveway and went outside to find him. I asked him, “What’s that smell?”
He replied, “I’m cleaning the floor of my garage with gasoline and soap.”
Questions and comments:
Does anyone else do this?
Why?
Given the high cost of gasoline, there’s got to be an alternative.
And he doesn’t even park his cars in the garage, so it couldn’t have been too dirty.
Crazy? Depends on how long he’s been breathing the fumes. Foolish, certainly. Aerosolized gasoline is pretty fricking dangerous, as a toxin to the lungs, and as a potential explosive. I have used extremely small amounts of gas before to help dissolve very small spots of oil (OK, I was young and foolish), but it would certainly be preferable to use a commercial oil cleanser. How close is his house to your garage? Is your insurance paid up?
Yes, your neighbor is absolutely nuts. You should never clean ANYTHING with gasoline. Cleaning floors with gasoline is a huge explosion hazard, the vapors could be ignited by a spark or a pilot light. If your neighbor does this again, call the fire department.
FYI, gasoline plus soap is the recipie for napalm.
I worked at a gas station for a few too many years, and I can tell you that gasoline is nearly the best way to clean oil off of concrete (IMO, kerosene works a bit better).
There’s two ways you can clean oil spots off of concrete, use detergent or use gasoline. Officially we were told to use either regular laundry detergent, or now and then they sent us several 2-gallon jugs of this special whoop-de-doo “INDUSTRIAL SUPER SOLVENT” type soap. Every time the area manager told us to clean the drive, we’d be sure to pour some of the INDUSTRIAL SUPER SOLVENT down the drain, so it looked like we used it.
The thing was, no type of soap they were willing to pay for ever worked more than a little. You’d spray a pump area to get it wet, and then dump the soap all over, and then scrub like hell with a push broom for a half-hour, then rinse off the area you’d scrubbed, and you’d have gotten maybe 50% of the oil off. The manager would have us do this two or three days in a row, because we couldn’t really get the drive clean in one night.
With gasoline, we’d turn on one of the pumps, pump a few gallons out onto the drive, let it sit for about 45 seconds, and then dump cat litter all over it, and then sweep the cat litter up. Around 95% of the oil will be gone, effortlessly. You can see evidence of this at gas pumps, if you look on the ground you see “clean” spots in the middle of the oily areas. The clean spots are where gasoline got spilled onto the ground.
The “soap” part I don’t understand. In our method we only used gasoline and cat litter. It is important not to get the area wet before hand- it only works when dry. If you add any water, the cat litter turns to mud.
And I do not deny that there are risks involved in using combustible fuels this way, but under our circumstances, those risks were really rather minor.
They also sent us cheap weed killer that didn’t work either. And gasoline does that pretty well and is way cheaper, too. - MC
I know we’re not supposed to flame each other in GQ, but I cannot help but comment that you are an even bigger nutcase than the OP’s neighbor. If I ever caught you pouring gasoline on the ground, whether it was to clean up oil spills or to kill weeds, I’d turn you in to the local HazMat team and you’d be in deep shit. That kitty litter didn’t magically make the oil and gasoline disappear, it ended up in the landfill, when it should be going to the hazardous waste processor. Yes, gasoline kills weeds, and then it gets into the ground water and kills fish, animals and eventually, humans. You are destroying the environment.
On a different note, cisco asked if napalm was made with styrofoam. I don’t know, but the recipe I know is from a resistance manual from Switzerland, published just after WWII and it says to mix soap flakes and gasoline. I don’t think styrofoam was invented back then, but napalm certainly was.
Former gas station worker checking in. My boss cleaned the work bay floors by tipping over batteries and pouring out the acid. Worked. Safety? He did not care, it worked. When his son took over, this stopped. I felt better.
You folks would have shot yourselves if you lived in my neighborhood in Philly.
Anti-Freeze, motor oil, transmission fluid, paint, gasoline…they all were poured into street sewers or taken for a short ride and dumped into the John Heinze Wildlife preserve near the Philadelphia International Airport.
I kid you not…
These folks cleaned everything with gasoline. They cleaned their hands with it, they cleaned paint with it, the street…you name it.
As long as you could blast it away (magically) with a hose, they would pour anything on the grass or street.
In Philly, where parking spaces are almost extinct, most people do their own motor work right in Pep Boys parking lots. Oil and other waste are dumped right on the ground or right in the trash.
oops, you’re right, I should know better. I only mentioned that in case the guy wants to know that his neighbor is making a batch of napalm on his garage floor.
And Philster, if your Philly mechanics tried anything like that in LA, they’d get arrested. California has strict laws against dumping waste in storm sewers, mandatory motor oil recycling, etc. I recall seeing one story of a guy who washed out a paintbrush at his curb, someone saw a streak of blue chemicals, they called in the HazMat squad and the guy got a citation for illegal dumping, and a cleanup fee of $25,000.
The neccessity and desireability of recycling motor oil was the main reason I quit changing it myself. Too much of a pain in the butt to drag it to an approved place. In the bad old days I used to pour it into a milk jug and throw it out with the trash. At one point in my student existence, I was renting on a dirt street, and the common wisdom was “throw it on the street - it’ll help keep the dust down”. I think there was a discussion here recently about oiling dirt roads - yes, they do that in some places.
Hijack:
I certainly don’t advocate improper disposal of petroleum distillates, and I certainly don’t want gasoline introduced into the ground water, but I sometimes wonder about the admissable levels. If you’ve ever lived in an area where there is natural petroleum seepage, you know that it gets on top of creeks and so on from natural sources sometimes. Not aesthetically pleasing, but the environment seems to tolerate it surprisingly well. Right here in the Bay Area, the Santa Cruz mountains have a few such areas - a Portola State Park ranger told me they had a couple people reporting oil floating on the creek and they called out the EPA. Turned out to be from natural seepage, and now they just tell people it’s from natural seepage and to stay out of the creek. There’s a creek on the edge of that area called “Tarwater” - guess why. I’m originally from NW PA - the big oil boom happened there because the stuff was already all over the place on the surface, and they knew they wouldn’t have to drill far to get it. Lived near “Oil Creek”. Guess why it was called that. Originally. After the big oil boom a lot of the natural seeps dried up, including the ones supplying the oil to float on top of Oil Creek.
Hey, feel free to flame. It ain’t really personal, anyway. I just wonder, do you tend to go to the cleanest gas stations or the dirtiest ones?
As far as the general subject of pollution goes, most every demolished gas station site I have heard of was used for another gas station: fuel tanks have to be underground, and fuel leaks out of the underground tanks and contaminates the soil to a much greater degree than the couple gallons per year we dumped on the weeds. And the local coal mine pollution has killed far more wildlife than anything else, by far.
It happens on 3rd shift, early in the morning. Go get 'em. -But you might want to switch to an electric car first. - MC
I live in CA, but I didn’t think to call HazMat at the time. I hope I never have to consider it again.
Chas.E: I don’t think he has a clue that it’s napalm. Makes one wonder what else he doesn’t have a clue about…
Thanks to all Posters. I’ll keep an eye on him.
Hmm… I betcha if you said you smelled chemicals and suspect your neighbor is running a meth lab, they’d be there in 5 minutes. But do you really want to start a war with your neighbor? Might be a good idea to have a friendly chat your local fire department about how you should handle this. Maybe they can give you something to talk him out of the gasoline washup, like brochures with horrible pictures of gasoline burn victims or something. Or maybe a copy of the relevant law might be enough.
Your neighbour’s days are numbered. Sooner or later he’s going to blow himself to kingdom come. Or poison himself to death, gasoline being exceptionally toxic.
I don’t know if he’s crazy, but you might want to ask him to provide you with a schedule of when he’s going to clean stuff with gasoline so you can make sure you aren’t near his garage when he’s doing it.
On the subject of napalm, you cannot just whip real napalm together by mixing gasoline with any ol’ stuff lying around the house; you certainly do not make actual napalm by mixing it with concentrated orange juice as per the “Fight Club” recipe.
Without explaining what’s in real military-grade napalm, suffice to say that the whole point to napalm is to make it gooey AND slow down the rate at which gasoline burns; gasoline burns so fast that it’s not an enormously effective weapon in war and is exceptionally dangerous for troops to handle. WWII-era “Napalm” was made with NAptha and PALMitate (what the hell is palmitate?) hence the name, but the stuff they use now has neither substance; the name sticks, though. Today’s napalm is actually very difficult to ignite; you could stub your cigarette out in it and it probably wouldn’t catch fire.
My uncle has worked for the Houston Fire Department for over 30 years. Back in the '70s, when he still rode the firetrucks, he mentioned that the captain (or whoever was in charge of his station) insisted they wash the trucks with kerosene as it was the only way to get them really clean. At the time, it seemed my uncle’s only objection to this was that we were in the midst of an energy crisis, and it seemed to be a waste of valuable fuel.
He didn’t even mention the safety issue, and this was at the freaking Fire Department!
Same as gasoline. You can drop a lit cigarette into a pool of gasoline, and it will be extinguished. But if you puff on a cig in a room filled with gasoline vapors, it will explode, if the air temp is above the flash point.
This here is a really big mistake. I’m hoping none of us Dopers are actually dumb enough to try this, 'cuz you will get hurt.
Chas.E: While your stunt might be technically true - the butt will be extinguished when it hits the pool of gasoline in the liquid phase - you didn’t consider where the vapor phase exists. ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE POOL! So prior to being extinguished in the pool of gasoline, it ignites the vapor. Big trouble.
You still might have a chance of escape. With a running start, you can probably outpace the igniting vapor as the flame spreads across the floor. The flame front of burning gasoline vapor travels about 30 feet per second.
On a lighter note, I grant that you could have made an honest mistake and were thinking of kerosene or diesel instead of gasoline like you mentioned. Those fuels (more precisely, their constituent components) have a much higher boiling point and release much less vapor than gasoline for any given temperature. In other words, they are much more difficult to ignite.
So aim your butts at the bucket of kerosene instead. It will be a whole lot safer for everyone.
