Gasoline fires could be horrific incidents, but there’s something amusing about the lengths to which some individuals will go when working with fuel. For example, a Daytona Beach, Fla., man did a DIY doozy on his car – he exchanged the fuel tank with a plastic gasoline can, then moved the can under the hood… right next to the heat-emitting engine. Only the truth could possibly be so bizarre. There is a comparable sentiment when it comes to the hokey old story that cellular phones cause fuel pump fires. Has this ever happened, or is it merely an urban legendintended to frighten hapless motorists? Source of article – Do cell phones cause fires at the gas pump by Car Deal Expert.
Cell phones and gas pumps – blazing inaccuracy
Urban legends are the business of Snopes.com, and they’ve trained their laser-guided truthiness on mobile phones and fuel pump fires. While your mobile phone instruction manual may have something in there about electromagnetic pulses, the hard truth according to Snopes.com is that science and media reports do not back up the explosive cell phone-gas pump notion. An EMP that produces enough of a static charge to send gas vapors up in flames sounds possible, but there’s no evidence of it happening due to cellular phone operation. 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 gas pump fire scenario. Media instances of such occurrences in China and Indonesia, as outlined by Snopes.com’s research, actually sprung from widely circulated Internet rumors dating back to 1999. In recent years, the Discovery channel program “Mythbuster! s” busted the myth.
The ‘official’ Shell Oil warning
A group claiming to be the Shell Oil Company circulated a warning in June 2002. They cited 3 examples that sounded specific enough to be real. And all it would take to become yet one more statistic would be for a motorist’s phone to simply ring in the presence of gasoline fumes. While the voltage on a cellular battery and the more powerful car battery are the exact same – 12 V – the current on cell batteries is much lower, and hence less dangerous. One story about cellular phones sending a brief 100-volt surge also seems to be false, a fabrication of the phone business during the height of their war with new cellular businesses .
Obviously, 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 – cellular phones can’t be connected. Talk away, but be sure to get the fuel in the tank, instead of on your shoes; distraction can be a bad thing.
Find more info on this subject
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
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