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LPG car explodes as driver lights cigarette
January 24, 2009
Peter Tidbury had just filled his Peugeot 607 with 40 litres of gas at a service station and was driving at around 30mph.
He could smell gas in the car and passed it off as remnants from the petrol station but it was in fact a cloud of fuel in the cabin.
Mr Tidbury decided to smoke a cigarette and the second he ignited the lighter, its flame sparked a fireball.
The windows were blown out and the bonnet and boot were thrown open by the force of the blast.
Nearby householders were evacuated for fear of a further explosion and the windscreen was discovered 50 feet away.
His clothes melted on him and firefighters believe he survived serious injury or death because the seats took the force of the explosion.
He had bought the car privately for £5,000 three weeks earlier and two garage checks gave it a clean bill of health before he got behind the wheel.
Mr Tidbury, 55, an energy-saving company manager, who needed hospital treatment for minor flash burns, said: “It just wasn’t my day to die.”
Mr Tidbury, a widower from south-east London, drove to northern England last weekend to visiting his daughter and friends.
After a website to locate a filling station selling LPG, he filled up in Monk Bretton, Barnsley, South Yorkshire.
He said: “I was told you get a slight smell of gas when you fill up so thought nothing of it and wound the window down to freshen the air and put it back up again.
“I fancied a fag so wound the window down again slightly and then lit up. I was doing about 30mph and as I lit the cigarette there was an almighty explosion.
“The windows went out, the bonnet went up and the boot went up just as you see in the Hollywood movies. I was belted in and braked sharply. I can’t remember this but I was told that I was directing traffic around the car whilst my suit jacket was still smoking.
“The fireball singed me on my face, hands and legs and melted my jacket lining and some of my shirt. I looked as if a firework had exploded in my face.”
It is thought a leak in the pipe from the filler to the fuel tank allowed gas to seep into the car which ignited when he lit up.
He added: “When I walked past that car to get in the ambulance I thought that was not survivable. For me it is miraculous.”
Mr Tidbury has ruled out buying another LPG car and intends to quit smoking.
Fire station watch manager Neil McQuillan said: “The car looked like a hand grenade had gone off in it. How anyone can survive an explosion like that when the car is severely damaged is remarkable really.”
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring
By Paul Stokes
Tags: Germany, korea, USRelated Posts:
Concerns about LPG Powered Cars in Enclosed Car Parks
January 23, 2009
LPG (under a variety of names “GPL” and “Auto gas” also) is widely used as a vehicle fuel in Far East, USA, Europe. USA, UK, Holland, Italy and France have particularly well developed infrastructures.
There are serious restrictions on LPG fuelled vehicles using ferries, tunnels, enclosed car parks. They do check and they turn back vehicles simply when found. All underground car parks in Europe and in the USA have signs banning for LPG powered vehicles.
Since 2001, LPG tanks and fuel systems are fitted with active safety mechanisms that better minimize the risk of explosion or leakage, making it safe to park vehicles also in multi-story and underground car parks. The Italy Interior Ministry allows all LPG vehicles with a safety system that complies to the ECE/ONU no. 67/01 Regulation to park on the first underground floor of multi-story car parks, even when connected to other underground floors.
LPG is pressurized and LPG tanks are sealed. Sealed tanks eliminate evaporative emissions or spillage. Using outage valves incorrectly during refueling, however, could cause excess vapor discharge.
The weight of LPG vapors at ambient temperatures is approximately 150 % the weight of air. If there is a leak, LPG vapors tend to sink to the ground and pool, creating a potentially hazardous situation. In some areas in North America, LPG vehicles are not allowed in enclosed car parks, tunnels. LPG is extremely volatile and burns twice as hot as a gasoline fire. Vehicle fuel tanks in LPG vehicles are of relatively thick-wall steel construction. In the event of a vehicle crash, they are much less prone to rupture or to cause fires than gasoline tanks.
LPG can explode when mixed with air in the range 1.8 % to 8.6 %. It requires a small ignition source, which could be a match, cigarette, electrical spark (think overhead catenary) or even a simple sharp strike against certain materials, particularly metals containing aluminum, magnesium, titanium etc.
You can smell a leak of LPG, but you have nowhere to go to escape in such place. LPG gas sinks so its difficult for the ventilation system to extract it. Spilt petrol falls to the ground, but then it evaporates. Auto gas is more explosive than petrol.
LPG is stored in a closed high pressure system so any breach will leak gas or liquid that rapidly gasifies leading to an air/gas mixture of potentially the correct proportions. Once ignited the explosion is highly likely to lead to fire and subsequent possible death by carbon monoxide poisoning as well as fire and shrapnel injuries.
Federal Council of Switzerland has officially banned LPG powered vehicles from multi-storey car parks! An appropriate sign was developed, but it cannot be used in German-speaking Switzerland because nobody understands the meaning of the French abbreviation GPL. Authorities has written to the Council to launch a debate on both a Switzerland-wide ban and an appropriate sign that can be understood throughout Switzerland, or even throughout Europe. The rules in force do not prohibit the imposition of individual bans. The owner or the management of a multi-storey car parks have the right to ban access to vehicles of this type by putting up an appropriate sign, and naturally such an arrangement would apply to foreign vehicles too.
In case of basement fires offer a degree of complexity and hazard beyond the normal building fire due to heat build up and the need for firefighting access being made from above. Enclosed car fires can develop to create an extreme heat and smoke environment, possibly compromising the structure. This may have a direct impact on not only occupants but also firefighter safety, especially in relation to search and rescue.
Insurance Companies in Europe and USA have continued the risk analysis and made recommendations on the construction, equipment and other safety measures of multi-storey enclosed car parks.
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The European Union has initiated a pilot project whose aim is to build secure parking areas
December 28, 2008
The number of attacks on LGVs, in which not only the load is stolen, but also the driver is threatened with a weapon or even injured is steadily increasing. Apart from the long term mental damage to the driver, every year this results in losses of around 8.5 billion Euros, with the trend increasing. The European Union has therefore initiated a pilot project whose aim is to build secure parking areas.
One such automated secure parking area is currently being developed in Germany at the Wörnitz Truck Stop on Exit 109 of the A7 Autobahn, north of the A6/A7 interchange. Wörnitz Truck Stop commissioned DESIGNA and Würzburger Stadtverkehrs GmbH to build a fully automated secure LGV parking area in compliance with the highest security standards.
From December 2008 there will be 25 fully automated secure parking spaces available for LGVs with at risk freight. A special feature of the new secure parking area, which is, of course, fully fenced in and under video surveillance, is automatic photographic logging of the
- vehicle licence plate
- driver
- vehicle from the top left hand side
- and the vehicle from the top right hand side.
This implementation of innovations developed by DESIGNA in the tried and tested PM ABACUS system enables the operation to be fully automated without the operator needing to employ a large number of staff, explained DESIGNAs sales manager, Marten Jentsch, summarising the advantages of the companys system.
Source:Nadine Lübbe http://www.designa.com
From: DESIGNA Verkehrsleittechnik GmbH
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Free Parking Comes at a Price
September 2, 2008
UCLA urban planning professor Donald Shoup says we have too many parking spaces in this country, especially the cheap and free kind. He argues that we pay the price for it in many different ways. Shoup’s point is made in a new book, The High Cost of Free Parking.
The Car Explosion
Coming to grips with the parking problem is essential because the rest of the world is poised to repeat America’s mistakes. America adopted the car much faster and to a far greater extent than other nations, and many factors help to explain this phenomenon — abundant land, rapid population growth, low fuel prices, and high incomes, among others. Abundant free parking also contributes to our high demand for cars because it greatly reduces the cost of car ownership. And because we own so many cars, we need lots of land to park them. We can speculate about the amount of land the whole world will need for parking if other nations ever acquire as many cars as Americans owned at the end of the twentieth century.
The first American gasoline car was sold in February 1896. By 2000, Americans owned 771 motor vehicles per 1,000 persons… Apart from dips during the Depression, World War II, and the early 1990s, ownership rose rapidly… In 2000, France had the same vehicle-ownership rate as the U.S. in 1972, Denmark the same as the U.S. in 1961, and China the same as the U.S. in 1912.
China is now the world’s fourth-largest market for new cars (after the U.S., Japan and Germany), but the U.S. still added more than twice as many vehicles during the 1990s (29 million) as China owned in 2000 (13 million). Other nations are, however, gaining on the U.S. Since 1950 the vehicle population has grown more than twice as fast outside the U.S. as inside. And yet, taken together, in 2000 the world outside the U.S. owned only 89 vehicles per 1,000 persons — the U.S. rate in 1920. But just as the U.S. vehicle-ownership rate doubled in the five years after 1920, rapid growth may also occur soon in other countries.
The 6.1 billion people on earth in 2000 owned 735 million vehicles. Imagine what would happen if all the countries on earth ever achieve the same vehicle-ownership rate as the U.S. in 2000: there would be 4.7 billion vehicles even if the U.S. population does not increase. A parking lot big enough to hold 4.7 billion cars would occupy an area about the size of England or Greece. If there are four parking spaces per car (one at home, and three more at other destinations), 4.7 billion cars would require 19 billion parking spaces, which amounts to a parking lot about the size of France or Spain. More cars would also require more land for roads, gas stations, used car dealers, automobile graveyards, and tire dumps.
If the past trends in vehicle ownership continue, the world will have more than 4.7 billion cars well before the end of the twenty-first century. Even if the vehicle population grows by only 2 percent a year, it will increase from 735 million in 2000 to 5 billion in 2100. Can the world supply all the fuel needed to power 5 billion cars? Will humans be able to breathe the fumes coming out of 5 billion exhaust pipes? And where will 5 billion cars park?
These questions are not meant to sound alarmist. A simple projection is often a poor forecast because technology and policy can change. For example, horse-drawn carriages befouled cities a century ago. In New York City in 1900, horses deposited 2.5 million pounds of manure on the streets every day. Projected growth in transportation demand made a publich health disaster seem inevitable, but then the horseless carriage solved that problem. Now, horseless carriages create their own problems, but new solutions will arrive. Improved technology will increase fuel efficiency and reduce pollution emissions, but technology alone is unlikely to solve the parking problem. Regardless of how fuel efficient our cars are or how little pollution they emit, we will always need somewhere to park them, and the average car spends 95 percent of its life parked.
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