Hawk & Badger Railroad Forum

Cell Phone hazard

You should know that: Mobile Phones can ignite fuel or fumes

Mobile phones that light up when switched on or when they ring release enough energy to provide a spark for ignition

Mobile phones should not be used in filling stations, or when fueling lawn mowers, boat, etc.

Mobile phones should not be used, or should be turned off, around other materials that generate flammable or explosive fumes or dust, (I.e., solvents, chemicals, gases, grain dust, etc...)

TO sum it up, here are the Four Rules for Safe Refueling:
1) Turn off engine
2) Don't smoke
3) Don't use your cell phone - leave it inside the vehicle or turn it off
4) Don't re-enter your vehicle during fueling.

Bob Renkes of Petroleum Equipment Institute is working on a campaign to try and make people aware of fires as a result of 'static electricity' at gas pumps. His company has researched 150 cases of these fires.

His results were very surprising:
1) Out of 150 cases, almost all of them were women.
2) Almost all cases involved the person getting back in their vehicle while the nozzle was still pumping gas. When finished, they went back to pull the nozzle out and the fire started, as a result of static.
3) Most had on rubber-soled shoes.
4) Most men never get back in their vehicle until completely finished. This is why they are seldom involved in these types of fires.
5) Don't ever use cell phones when pumping gas
6) It is the vapors that come out of the gas that cause the fire, when connected with static charges.
7) There were 29 fires where the vehicle was re-entered and the nozzle was touched during refueling from a variety of makes and models. Some resulted in extensive damage to the vehicle, to the station, and to the customer.
8) Seventeen fires occurred before, during or immediately after the gas cap was removed and before fueling began.

Snopes http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/static.asp
Another one of those lets distort the truth and scare people messages.

Looks to me as if the buck is being passed and the cause of the real fires is not totally known.

To be on the save side, I'm gona try to avoid a static spark, if at all possible, when gassing up from now on.

I heard that if links are added to a post, both sites have a higher rank in Search Engines.
I'll try it. I'm not sure if it will work the way I did it here. It will now be in over 1300 posts here

That's true to a point Gwizz.
Google is the major player in link-backs as page rank, although the others do it as well. However, the catch is the link-backs should come from a high ranking site and this site doesn't rank very high, primarily due to me not putting in the effort to get a good rank years ago when I built the site because I didn't do any research into page ranking and SEO (Search Engine Optimization), consequently achieving quite the opposite. Now, with close to 700 pages, it's not going to be an easy task to go back through them all and make the needed changes, especially when others are paying me to do that to their sites.

I've since done a lot more studying and research into SEO since I now have customers that depend on me doing it right, or at least better.

Add to that the fact that I have a nofollow line in the robots.txt file that tells search bots to not look in the forum, so they don't even come here, for the most part. I did that to try to help keep the bandwidth usage down since this site uses a gargantuan amount every month. Keeping the bots out may not seem like much but every little bit helps.

Now, let's throw another wrench in the cogs of your machine. The way you added the link to The Terminal could very well be read by some search engines as spamming - especially Google - , since the link is out of context with the sentence and the context of the post.
That's an old spammers trick; just through a bunch of links around on a page and get good ranking, so the search engines did some editing on the algorithms in their bots to keep an eye out for that technique and if the search bot determines that's what's going on it puts one or both sites in the black-hole for up to a year.
I'm not saying this will happen. I'm just saying this could happen, although the way you did it is no where near as bad as what their setup to look out for, it's still built into the core of their algorithms, but you can leave it if you want. I don't have a problem with a link to The Terminal being in your sig. I seriously doubt it's going to hurt anything since folks add links to their forum signatures all the time so I'm guessing in that context the search bots may take it for what it is, plus the fact that the bots don't come here anyway.

Thank you for the education. If you think the link could become detremental, I will remove it.

Thinking about it, I doubt it will be detrimental, since search bots don't come here, which means it probably won't help being there either.
I do have a link to The Terminal on the Links page. That's probably more of a help than in these forums.

FYI, Each time when I delete cookies and history etc. , I use Google to reset my password and I only have to type "Hawk RRT3" and your site always pops up at or near the top of the list. I've never tried other search engines. When I visit using other computers I have the same results.

I don't have the site blocked from search bots. Just the forums.

Gandar wrote:Snopes http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/static.asp
Another one of those lets distort the truth and scare people messages.

The Mythbusters TV show did a whole story on this topic a few years ago. Nothing they tried created a spark from a cell phone. However, static electricity from getting in and out of your car is still a possibility.

A static charge, as well as the idiot smoking, has the possibility of starting a fire. In the military, we had to use a grounding clip before we fueled up any gas powered vehicle. Even if that was using a hand pump from a 55 gallon drum.

Now, the real hazard with cell phones and cars is the idiot behind the wheel with one glued to his, her left ear - mostly hers. I have more then once seen a her rear end another car that has stopped for traffic before making a left turn. The last one that did this never saw the car that stopped in front of her. She hit it at about 45mph. Some of those people are always yapping on them 24-7.

Apparently, they must have a bad fire problem at gas stations in the Detroit area since all of them have huge fire extinguishers mounted above the pumps on the canopy posts. You don't want to be by one if it goes off accidentally. http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=acf_1205798056

I went to a demonstration offered by the Fire Department once to learn out to use the different fire extinguishers. During that demonstration we were told that cigarettes won't actually light gasoline. The fireman said that is was part of their training, when we asked incredulously.

Apperently it is believed that the ash forms an insulative barrier which prevents gasoline from igniting. All those movies, etc, that show someone thwoing a cigarette onto gasoline are just special effects. The concern over smoking at gas stations is more to do with the matches and lighters.

Never actually confirmed this, but why would a fireman trainer lie?

This was confirmed on Myth Busters. Throwing a lit cigarette down onto a trail of gasoline actually put the cigarette out.

Though a cigarette wouldn't ignite the liquid gasoline, it's those pesky vapours you have to watch out for. As for static electrical discharge, I think I have a simple and cheap solution. Why not attach an anti-static wrist strap to the nozzle head and have the person fueling their vehicle put the strap on before fueling? Works like a charm when working inside a computer tower. Since the nozzle is bonded to the car, and the person bonded to the nozzle, they could touch the car and be at the same voltage potential relative to it. ie. 0