China Shipping Container Lines Raises Rates
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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: spark, danger, CarRelated Posts:
Chinese economy where to go post-Olympics
September 28, 2008
As the 2008 Beijing Olympics ended in a splendor of fireworks, concerns over a post-Games downturn for the Chinese economy re-emerged.
History shows that some host countries had experienced post-Olympic declines because investment dropped, such as Tokyo and Seoul.
Japan witnessed a drastic fall in growth the year after the 1964 Games, down to 5.2 percent from the year-earlier 13.1 percent. The Republic of Korea saw the rate slip from 10.6 percent to 6.7 percent in 1989.
Will China follow the same pattern? The world ponders. You can read the rest of article published in China Daily here : News Analysis: Chinese economy where to go post-Olympics
Tags: chinese economy, urban parking, growthRelated Posts:
ANPR – Number Plate Recognition Technology
July 16, 2008
Recent advances in Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technologies have lead to a greater acceptance of the technology by car-park operators. The new digital ANPR technologies present greater read rates than traditional CCTV/PC based technologies and offer far greater flexibility in deployment and customization than previously available.
By attaching a unique signature to every vehicle entering and exiting a car park the potential of a car-park management system is greatly enhanced. The signature widely used by vehicle identification technologies is usually the registration number displayed on the front and rear of the vehicle. To robustly read this plate in all weather conditions, day and night and to increase the ability of a system to read dirty plates, Alpha Vision Design has developed a stand alone digital ANPR station that can extract the registration number and automatically present the number for processing.
The applications of ANPR technologies can be used for tolling, police enforcement, journey time analysis, average speed violation and access control. Within the car parking domain, most car park operators use ANPR technology as a medium to locate lost vehicles, to calculate occupancy times and to dramatically decrease the revenue loss associated with ticket fraud.
ANPR is also finding favour within non-supervised car parks as a means to control access via a white list. This white list contains a list of vehicles with known access rights. Suitable for hotel, apartment and company car parks, this negates the use of disposable paper tickets and wireless FOBs. Companies with large fleets are introducing ANPR as a cost effective method of tracking their vehicles throughout their depots. Large supermarkets and chains are also beginning to utilize the information obtained from their car-parks as a way of highlighting demographic patterns with a view to maximizing profits.
For any traffic management system to be a success, the read rate must exceed 99%. Traditionally most operators shied away from ANPR when they discovered that their true read rates were rarely above 60%. In real world applications, this was the limit, not due to poor software but the result of using conventional CCTV systems to obtain the images. CCTV technology is 50 years old and does not lend itself well to computer recognition systems.
The common processing core for CCTV based ANPR systems is a PC. CCTV/PC based systems are not robust and are unacceptably high maintenance. To counter this, Alpha Vision Design has developed a self-contained ANPR system designed specifically for the car parking industry. This system includes an integrated illuminator, high resolution digital camera, digital analyser and on-board relays, all contained in one standard security housing. Only mounting and a power cable is required – an industry first!
A high resolution camera obtains images that are over sixteen times larger in area size than CCTV images. Combined with a wider field of view, now only one camera is required to capture both the registration plate and an overview of the vehicle, and vehicle placement within a lane is no longer an issue which leads to greater capture rates.
The camera /computer unit can in real time adjust the exposure, gain, and the integrated on-board IR lighting to maximise the contrast and readability of the registration plate, including dirty plates, variations in plate reflectivity, strong headlamps and adverse weather conditions. This cannot be done with CCTV/PC based ANPR systems.
The setup is easy and is only required once per site, with no re-configuration necessary even after a power outage as the system will reboot automatically. On a typical 800 bay car-park, the system can also store up to five years of data, capturing and time stamping an image of every vehicle entering and exiting the facility. The system is true Plug & Play and can directly control a parking barrier via its on-board database and integrated relays. For configuration, simply use any standard web browser to manage the ANPR station – no third party software is required to manage the entire ANPR network.
Our standard systems are shipped in three versions. We have an ANPR station designed for operating at a 10 meter and 25 meter range, and a system for high speed traffic applications. All systems are pre configured and only mounting is required. The ANPR stations can act stand alone or integrate with an existing parking entry ticket/gate system. For remote applications, the ANPR station can also be configured to run over GPRS, TCP/IP and WIFI Networks.
Source: http://www.parkingireland.ie
Tags: intelligent, olympic, parkadeRelated Posts:
Yerevan: Facing Lack of Subway Car Parking
July 16, 2008
Today in a discussion session conducted in the Municipality of Yerevan the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan was also present. According to the officials the problem number one in our city is the lack of subway car parking even in the central part of the city, reported the press service of the President’s Administration.
During the discussion the president said that the main problem is that cars are parking in wrong territories and places and not the points that there are too many cars in our city. “We should work on this rather seriously and find some solutions,” said the president.
According to the information and public relations department of the Municipality, the director of Italian “Renko” company Giovanni Rubini was also present at the discussion. He said that the representative of Italian Company in Armenia is “Armenian PPP” and as soon as they are authorized to conduct the project they will start constructing sub way car parking first in the squares of Aznavour and Saxarov and then expand the project.
The President said that the construction of those subway car parking is very important to make simple the traffic in Armenia.
Source: http://www.panorama.am
Tags: United States, portugal, mechanical parkingRelated Posts:
