Thread: Now that left a MARK.......

Tweet

ive seen it before and i think its more urban legend , the story i read said it all happened in fla. funny story and it could happen , i used to park my scoot in the living room and work on them as well back in the day before my wife turned into such a picky person and the fact that her daddy used to re-build his shrimp boat engines in the house ,

Hmm,
You can't start gas on fire by throwing a cigarette in it!

Pat

i worked in a gas station in the 80's. a guy was pumping his gas with a cigarette, i asked him to put it out. he said he was a fuel engineer in the navy and a cigarette will not ignight gas. he then removed the nozzel from the tank and released a 4 foot diameter puddle on the ground. he then entered the circle and threw his cigarette right in the gas where he stood, and he was right no fire.

A block away from where I grew up in Missouri in the 60's, a 13 year old kid I knew was filling up the gas tank on the family lawnmower when his older brother, who also subscribed to this ciggy won't ignite gas crap, flipped a lit butt at the mower while the kid was filling the tank. The gasoline DID ignite and burned the kid with 3rd degree burns over 95% of his body. He was left without a nose, ears, hair, or eyelids. Horrendous injuries. This was after he spent two years at the Shriners burn unit in Houston. He was unlucky enough to survive as what he was left with no one would want to deal with the rest of their lives. He was left looking like a monster. The older brother later committed suicide.

Guys this is not hearsay. I know this from first hand information.

Under certain conditions its true that a lit butt won't ignite gas, but if there is a spark and enough vapor it will. Lets stop propogating this myth.

It's a fake story. http://www.snopes.com/embarrass/accident/toilet.asp The keys are "the way my friend told it" and "a guy". There is nothing specific in the column. In other versions, he broke his collar bone or his arm . . . or it was oily rags in the toilet in the toilet instead of raw gas. There are a hundred versions of the "blown off the toilet" story. It's also been circulated in those "friendly" have-you-heard-this emails that all your cousins like to send you when they have nothing better to do.

It's a shame that the columnist had nothing better to write about than this tired old urban legend. That old story is on a hundred websites, and her boss should call her on the carpet for plagarism.

What Jack said!

As for the gasoline, there's a technicality in that answer. Liquid gasoline won't ignite, gasoline VAPORS however will. (the basic rule is only vapors will burn regardless of the fuel) THAT'S why the sign at the stations is there. They aren't worried about a puddle of gasoline, it's the vapors escaping from the fill pipe. With vapor recovery systems in many areas this may be somewhat of a reduced concern, but not enough for me. If anyone has gotten away with an ignition source around gasoline they've been lucky that the air/fuel ratio hasn't been right, or the ignition source hasn't been close enough to the space where the a/f ratio was right.

The Navy "fuel engineer" was a lucky idiot (emphasis on the idiot). Besides, odds are he was an "expert" on heavy fuel oil (far less volatile than gasoline), not gasoline, if he was any kind of "expert" at all.

the guys at myth busters on the discovery channel proved that you can not light a toilet with gasoline and a lit cig.

as a small kid i was in my pops barn smoking a cig and thought i was about to get caught so i thru the damn thing in what i thought was a bucket of water when in fact it was a bucket of gas and VOOM the bucket melted and it spread out over the floor and went up a wall , at this time i was making tracks and i did go and tell my grandpa what i had done , long story a little shorter ,
1 burned down barn
1 burned up 55 belair
1 burned up 39 willys coupe
1 burned up 64 impala <grannys car>
my pops was able to get it under enough control as to not burn down his hay and cow barns ..

getting off scott free for running and telling granpaw?
PRICELESS.

Writing this between sobs. Always bugs me when I see someone pumping gas and talking on a cell phone at the same time.

ok guys don't shoot the messager..
It was a newspaper clipping that I was emailed & so what if I didn't check snopes. hell I would of thought it was true myself.

Did ya get a laff???? if so i did my job...joe

I used to think I was a bright young lad ,.....I saw pops prime the carb on the lawn mower to get it started ,long story short ,I filled the carb all the way to the top,centered my head over the carb{to watch the gas} and sure enuff all of it got sucked right down into the engine ,then about a micro second later ,it all spewed back into my face like old faithful
I was alright after a little session with the garden hose ,never told pops about that one
Keep in mind I was not even in first grade yet country kids get a head start on that stuff ,compared to city kids,even had my own horse I rode down to the creek to fish in at such a young age
Ahh the good ole days.

When I heard the story it was the wife saw a spider in the toilet sprayed bug killer in the toilet then closed the lid, the husband came in with a cig threw it in the toilet and burned his butt. Still laugh everytime I hear something like it.
One of the best stories I heard was the husband threw a rope over the house and told the son to tie it to something strong. Then the husband climbed the roof to work. The wife came out jumped into the car and drove off, she was three blocks down the road before she knew she was dragging something. LOL I always wondered if he beat the kid first or the wife after he healed up.
Brad