On 2011-09-10, GeoLane at PTD dot NET GeoLane wrote:

[ ... ]

In another episode, a number of years ago, a construction truck ran
out of diesel and it was night. The boss's son brought some fuel and
they were filling the tank. Since they didn't have a flashlight, the
son lit a match and held it over the tank to see how much he had in it
and had an explosion. He wasn't too severely injured. The latter
anecdote from my brother in law who witnessed the incident and had
told the kid he didn't think it was a very good idea to be lighting
matches around the tank. Since they were fueling, there was probably
a lot of fumes coming off the fill neck. It might be a similar
situation with a parts washer spraying kero on a part.

Hmm ... reminds me of what I saw on a side street some 20 years
ago or more. A car had run out of gas at night. It was one of those
with the fill pipe behind the rear license plate. They were pouring
into that with a flex-neck can. I could see fumes pouring out of the
neck in the light from my headlights.

About two feet behind the fill neck and can was a burning road
flare to keep people from running into them. Since I had my wife along
at the time, I just zipped past as quickly as I could. When we got out
of the restaurant later, there was no sign of any problems there, so
they must have been *very* lucky.

Enjoy,
DoN.

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