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 fuel can – then move the can to a space under the hood, next to the engine. It’s stranger than fiction. You will find stories that have circulated about cellular phones and just how they supposedly cause gasoline pump fires. Do gas stations have good reason to post warning signs on the pump, or is the static electricity danger cell phones allegedly pose to refueling motorists merely an urban legend?
Cell phones and gas pumps – blazing inaccuracy
Urban legends are the business of Snopes.com, and they’ve trained their laser-guided truthiness on cell phones and gas pump fires. While your mobile phone instruction manual may have something in there about electromagnetic pulses, the hard truth as outlined by Snopes.com is that science and media reports do not back up the explosive cell phone-gas pump notion. Certain, 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. While there may be some validity to not using cell phones around hospital or airliner equipment, there’s no smoke and hence no fire when it comes to the mobile phone gasoline pump fire scenario. Media instances of such occurrences in China and Indonesia, according to Snopes.com’s research, actually sprung from widely circulated Internet rumors dating back to 1999. A number of years later, “Mythbusters” made those spook tales of gasoline pump horror give up the ghost on their program.
’Shell Oil’ sounded the alarm
A group claiming to be the Shell Oil Company circulated a warning in June 2002. Three examples were given, and all of them sounded like they might be authentic. The erroneous claim made within the e-mail message is that all a mobile phone has to do is ring to emit an EM pulse powerful enough to ignite gasoline fumes within the air (for instance those produced at the gasoline pump). Yes, cell phone batteries may be of the exact same voltage (12 V) as automobile batteries, but that does not mean cellular batteries emit the exact same amount of current. There was once a circulating claim that cell phones use “more than 100 volts,” but that appears to are a rumor traced back to the traditional land-line telephone industry during the first phases of competition with the emerging cellular industry.
As you can imagine, Shell Oil denied they’d ever produced the message.
The fear is unfounded
Even if a gasoline station tank does go up – it has happened – cell phones cannot be connected. Talk away, but be sure to get the gasoline in the tank, instead of on your shoes; distraction could be a bad thing.
Additional reading
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
