There’s nothing funny about gasoline fires in and of themselves, but some people scale the heights of lunacy when it comes to what they’ll do with their fuel. One Daytona Beach, Fla., man gave himself second degree burns, and all because he thought it was a good idea to replace his car’s tank with a plastic gas can – then move the can to a space under the hood, next to the engine. It is stranger than fiction. There is a comparable sentiment when it comes to the hokey old story that cell phones cause gas pump fires. Has this ever happened, or is it merely an urban legenddesigned to frighten hapless motorists?
Cell phones and the gas pump: inferno of misinformation
Snopes.com has a good deal to say about cellular phones and fuel pump fires, in the interests of cutting through the misinformation. Cell phone manufacturers may consist of obligatory warning notices in their product manuals, but the only sparks are those of curiosity as to how this rumor ever got began. Sure, it may sound feasible – electromagnetic waves producing a static charge that ignites the gasoline vapor – but you will find simply no cases to back it up. Don’t fire up the smartphone around your cousin’s iron lung or during takeoff from Istanbul, but it appears to be safe to use it around the gasoline pump. As far as Snopes.com can tell, rumors of explosions in China and Indonesia stemmed from old Internet yarns dating back to 1999, instead of actual events. In recent years, the Discovery channel program “Mythbusters” busted the myth.
’Shell Oil’ sounded the alarm
In June 2002, a warning was issued via the Internet by what was supposedly the Shell Oil Company. Three cases of cell phones causing gas pump fires were accounted in some detail. The warning centered around the “fact” that all a mobile phone had to do in order to send a motorist to their fiery death was ring; the EMP would provide the necessary spark. While the voltage on a cellular battery and the more powerful vehicle battery are the exact same – 12 V – the current on cell batteries is much lower, and hence less dangerous. A scary story about mobile phones generating “more than 100 volts” in brief spurts, which would be potentially dangerous, was a falsehood likely planted by the phone corporations when cellular technology was new.
As you can imagine, Shell Oil denied they’d ever produced the message.
The fear is unfounded
It is most likely that when numerous verified instances of fires at gasoline stations were indeed touched off by static discharge, cellular phones were never proven to be the culprit. Talk away, but be sure to get the gas within the tank, rather than on your shoes; distraction can be a bad thing.
Daytona Beach News-Journal
news-journalonline.com/breakingnews/2010/08/manu-using-gas-can-as-fuel-tank-suffers-burns.html
Snopes
snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp
