Another fun one is tumbleweeds. If you run over one they love to get lodged underneath for a few miles. If you are lucky it will grind itself up and fall out before it catches on fire.
I pulled into the base barber shop one time and smelled a strong gasoline odor. I saw gas dripping out of a p/u and in the back were several plastic gas containers. The guy had apparently filled them to the brim and then left them in the hot sun in his truck, the bed was flooded w/ gas. Had to get the base fire dept. to come clean up the mess.
Obviously the cool gas, from an underground tank, had expanded in the sun and leaked out.
Darwin award in progress.
Reguleader
I believe you are referring to the TWA800 flight, there are quite a few competing conspiracy theorists, but the accident investigation discovered that,
Fuel sensor wiring in the tanks was run in conduits next to cables carrying much higher voltages.
The insulation of the sensor wiring was only rated for very low voltages.
(wiring code states that when you run cables together carrying several voltages, then all the cables must be rated for the highest voltage)
One of those higher votage cables developed a fault and burned away its insulation - I believe they actually found this section of wire - electrically burned insulation is quite distinctive (I know this from being electrician myself).
Since both low voltage and high voltage cables were touchng each other, the damaged insulation on the higher voltage cable then exposed the lower voltage cable to voltage that it was not rated to withstand.
The result was that the low voltage cable had its own insulation fail, and instead of perhaps 5volts going to the fuel sensors, they were exposed to over 400 volts.
This is not a good thing in an almost empty tank full of fuel vapours, and the sensors burned out.
Personally, I think the conspiracy theorists are nuts, a burned out electrical cable is so distinctive that when they found the section responsible(amongst the mass of wires from the aircraft wiring loom) it just screamed out as being the cause, things such as missile explosions, bokbs etc cannot possibly produce that sort of damage, and after all this time, any group capable of acquring and launching a missile would surely have claimed responsibility, and there would have probably been several other missile attempts.
http://tc.engr.wisc.edu/UER/uer00/author2/content.html
I thought (maybe mistakenly) that flight 800 was taking off when the disaster occured. Wouldn’t the plane have all its tanks full? 
Not necessarily. All that fuel gets heavy, and ironically enough, carrying a lot of it adversely affects your fuel effeciency, making it more expensive to operate that way. If they didn’t need the range that full tanks would have given the plane, they might have only kept the tanks with enough fuel to get to the plane’s destination, plus an extra ammount in reserve in case they needed it. I think they’re required to top off the tanks more often now as a safety precaution.
Ahh, as Rick and casdave pointed out to me, the only wires in the gas tank are those for the fuel sensors, and the problem comes from when those wires are next to higher voltage wires elsewhere and lack the proper voltage/insulation. This mighta been what happened in the story my flight instructor told me, he didn’t elaborate on the nature of the wiring in the plane, except that it ran through the gas tank.
I saw in the paper that a lot of SUV s are catching fire. The higher the gas price climbs the more that it will occur. insurance companies have taken note. So arson is a cause.