My mom’s dad worked in the oilfields from the mid 1920’s through early 60’s. During my mom’s early childhood granddad was a roustabout. Basically that means any shit job on the well he did. He came home covered in oil many times. Especially if they had something broke and oil was gushing. He later became a Pumper (drove around doing maintenance on wells and went out at night to fix a well that had stopped).
They lived in the oil camps during the depression. Mom reminds my grandmother washing granddad’s oil soaked work clothes in a big boiling kettle of gasoline. Mom thinks it was a special kettle. Maybe copper? She doesn’t recall for sure. Her job (age six and up) was to stand beside the kettle with a wooden paddle. Any clothes that broke the surface would catch on fire and burn holes in granddad’s work clothes. Her job was to shove them back under the surface (of the gas with the wooden paddle.
Doesn’t sound too safe does it? A large kettle of gasoline over a open pit fire. But it was how everybody in the oil camp washed their husband’s oily clothes. Nobody could afford to replace work clothing until it totally wore out in the depression. There was danger everyday anyway. My granddad was nearly killed by a guy dropping a wrench off a oil derek. Granddad kept the dented metal hardhat in his closet. Even with the hat that wrench knocked him to his knees. Their shanty house in the oil camp flooded twice. It was a dangerous life. But granddad was never out of a job during the depression. He worked in the same oil fields his entire career.
So, why didn’t the kettle of gas go boom! We got some physics people here. Maybe there’s an explanation why what seems suicidal really wasn’t. (that doesn’t mean an occasional accident didn’t happen).
Well, my mom helped wash clothes outside in that kettle from age 6 up until she graduated high school and left for nursing school. She’s positive it was gasoline in that pot. Grandmother got one of those wringer washers in the late 30’s or 40’s that used a small gasoline motor. They didn’t have electricity back then. Too far back in the woods. They had natural gas piped in off the well and had gas lights in the house. Anyway, the clothes were handwashed and then run through the power wringer to get them dry as possible. Then hung on a clothesline.
The gas they used would have been casing head gas. Directly off the well. Unrefined. Some oil fields produced high quality casing head gas and the men used it in their trucks. It got sold too. But, it’s best not to talk about that. The El Dorado/Smackover fields never produced decent casing head gas. Too much saltwater and not much octane. You couldn’t run a truck off it. But it was fine for washing the worker’s clothes.
Apparently it really was done. This Wikipedia entry on dry cleaning talks about the use of gasoline and kerosene in dry cleaning.
Here’s a 1930s safety film from the California State Fire Marshall warning about washing with gasoline. It was as much a propaganda film for the dry cleaning industry as it was a safety film, but it shows that this was a real practice.
Edited to add: However, neither of these links mention boiling gasoline.
I can see why that woman got hurt. She was using the gas indoors. Fumes built up. IIRC don’t gasoline fumes pool into pockets along the floor of a room or garage? One spark in that air/gas mixture and… boom. That still happens today. Guys clean engine parts in a garage with gas. Pockets of gas build up and they get badly hurt.
My mom indicated they washed clothes outdoors and well away from the house. I don’t know how big a fire was under the kettle. It may have mainly been coals. She doesn’t remember. This was in the 1930’s and 40’s.
Wouldn’t a copper kettle be less likely to spark if scratched? It shouldn’t build up any static electricity either. Mom remembers using a wooden paddle to keep the clothes poked underneath the surface. They probably used that paddle to take them out too. So no sparks there either.
This is one of those memories best left in the past. No way would anyone want to try this now. Whatever safety procedures those women used are long forgotten now.
I recall the Mythbusters having a lot of trouble getting gas to explode. They tested several myths. Like a cell phone ringing while someone filled up their car at a service station pump. They had several others too. They always had problems getting just the right combustible mixture of air and gas fumes to be explosive.
I guess that’s what makes gasoline so dangerous. You can handle it improperly many times and never get hurt. People get over confidant that they know what they are doing. Then one day it blows up in their face.
Buy 8 quarts of oil. Open each can and pour over your head, down your shirt, and down into your pants. That sort of simulates what happens to a roustabout (in the 1920’s and 30’s) when a oil well gushes. Although raw crude oil is even more tar like than the auto oil we buy in a can. It didn’t happen every day. But working in the oil fields usually results in some oil on their clothes. My grandad didn’t get nearly as dirty working as a Pumper because he was just repairing and doing maintenance on the wells.
How would you wash those clothes where it was acceptable to wear them to work again?
I’ve wondered what modern oil field workers do. Tide and Clorox won’t stand a chance cleaning heavily oil soaked clothing.
Luckily I’ve heard gushers are rare these days. The drilling process is much more precise and they don’t let the wells gush anymore.
Someone will probably ask. Heres the definition of a roustabout in the oil industry. After a few years you get promoted to roughneck. The older men eventually get promoted to Pumper.
Ain’t no way your grandmother washed clothes in gasoline over an open fire. I don’t doubt that she boiled clothes to clean them in water, and I don’t doubt she used cold gasoline to get oil stains out, but there is no way at all that she combined open flames and a pot of gasoline. The two things have been conflated.
One single splash or splatter out of the pot and the gas would have gone up in a fireball. Even without that, a single spark rising from the fire into the fumes above the pot would have done the same. It just isn’t even close to being possible and anyone who says different has never done anything involving flame and gasoline.
Further, it just isn’t necessary: gasoline is exceedingly effective at getting oil out at room temperature. Why would you have to take an absolutely insane risk (a complete death sentence, actually) boiling the gasoline to achieve something that would happen at room temp anyway?
What do you know, people will try anything (see below).
That is a reason why the story does not sound right. It would make more sense if it was a water kettle and the petroleum products were floating to the surface. Why boil a solvent?
I am in the middle of an experiment where I have done just that (almost). I soaked a pair of jeans in used motor oil to see if I could get some interesting staining. My first instinct was to remove the oil with a solvent, and all I had handy was gasoline. The gasoline did little to remove the oil and left me with a pair of jeans that now reeked of gas and old oil. After rinsing thoroughly and leaving outside to air for a couple of weeks, I followed some on-line recommendations and soaked the jeans for a day in Dawn dishwashing liquid and then gave them a wash. That process left the jeans in a still permeated with oil, but wearable state. After three more soaks and about ten more washes over many weeks, the jeans still smell mildly of oil and have a slight oily residue, but have been wearable as work clothes.
It is possible that I just did not use enough gasoline to deal with the amount of oil in the jeans. I was concerned about being able to dispose of the mixture after rinsing.
I have to agree with you. Cleaning with gasoline? Sure. I’ve done it many a time. A huge kettle of gas over an open flame? This would have only been tried once.
In any case, gas is enough of a solvent that it doesn’t need to be boiled. Putting the gas soaked clothes (carefully) into a kettle of boiling water makes some sense.
Industrial laundromat. They don’t get as dirty now as they did then (no, you don’t have ‘gushers’ any more), but they still get pretty coated with oil and grease. And they don’t wash their coveralls daily, but at the end of your rotation usually. The guys will have a couple or three pairs in case they get one pair too dirty to wear.
You mother may have boiled clothes in a kettle of water or kept clothes agitating in a kettle full of non-heated gasoline. Boiling gas in a kettle over a fire would quickly be deadly on multiple levels. She is conflating the two or confusing petroleum soaked water with gas.
That may be what happened. This was 70 plus years ago and mom was very young. She may not have realized what was going on.
WAG maybe only a little gasoline was added to the kettle of water? Like a pint of gas mixed with 6 gallons of water. That might work without creating a deadly situation. I wish that I had thought to ask my grandmother about life in the oil camps before she died. We spent a lot of time together when I was younger. Never thought to write down any of the history that she mentioned.
I looked around on the web and couldn’t find anything on laundry at the old oil camps. Got plenty of useless hits for camps and laundry. Google can be a frustrating time waster when the terms are too common.
Thanks everybody for your answers. I knew the Dope would either help me substantiate or debunk this old family story.
Gasoline at normal atmospheric pressure needs an ignition source, a spark to ignite and ignite the vapors, not the liquid. Presuming that the fire underneath never let a spark go and ignite the vapors, this is possible, but that is a big if. Gasoline is safer in cars than ethanol, which burns invisibly. Not as safe as diesel, which is probably closer to what your mom was using. Diesel will have much fewer vapors and be harder to ignite. I vote possible, but don’t put me on the list for trying it.
“Any clothes that broke the surface would catch on fire and burn holes in granddad’s work clothes” -
I’m assuming the clothes catching “on fire” would be a sufficient ignition source for the hot gas fumes boiling off the kettle of gas. The scenario as described is effectively a bomb. Beyond this you have a 6 year old girl standing next to volatizing gas vapors as they boil out of kettle. She would be dead from lung damage in short order even if the kettle did not blow up which it certainly would have under the described conditions. The posited scenario is utterly absurd.
The El Dorado/Smackover fields never produced decent casing head gas. Too much saltwater and not much octane. You couldn’t run a truck off it. But it was fine for washing the worker’s clothes.
Google can be a frustrating time waster when the terms are too common.