And being stupid too does not help.
When a man tried lighting up a cigarette inside his SUV Thursday night, the vehicle suddenly exploded and flew into pieces. The cause?
He had some other materials inside the vehicle.https://t.co/FWWXuK1wps pic.twitter.com/7MZ0qc6Qe7
— KCAL News (@kcalnews) May 24, 2024
An SUV parked in a Van Nuys parking lot on Thursday night suddenly exploded after the driver lit a cigarette next to some propane canisters he stored inside.
Firefighters and police rushed to a supermarket parking lot in the 7200 block of Van Nuys Boulevard after receiving a call about an SUV that exploded around 10:30 p.m., police said. When first responders arrived, the man told them he had been trying to light a cigarette when the explosion happened. Investigators said he was living in the vehicle during the explosion.
He suffered minor injuries and was taken to a nearby hospital, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
must not have had too gooda sense of smell… or, the stupid is deep..propane 1, Toyota 0…maybe the DOD could use him as a bomb sniffin dog, apparently hes fire proof…
Did we just find Hancock? Seriously, given the state of the SUV, how did he survive?
I am not an expert in any way, but… doesn’t the concentration of a flammable gas have to reach some critical concentration before it will ignite?
In order for an “explosion” the propane concentration would have been high enough to be obvious.
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Somehow, I think this was not an accident. Suicide?
Yes, the stoichiometric ratio (how much fuel per how much oxidizer per how much inert stuff) has to be right. Too little or too much fuel per unit air, and you won’t get ignition. (If it were a pure propane atmosphere, for instance, nothing much would have happened. He’d also be dead from asphyxiation, but that’s beside the point. 🙂 )
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I wonder if he was “nose-blind” to the propane odorant, either because he’d been around it a while, or for other reasons. Can you even buy propane at the consumer level without the odorant?
Right.
The term is anosmia…
Same thing happens with ammonia.
The atmospheric detectors we used for closed space entry had LEL detection, (and O2, CO2, CO, etc.) but the documents always specified an UEL for specific flammable gasses as well.
(Lower explosion limit, Upper explosion limit.)
Forgot to add this to my reply..
There have been a number of fatalities where people access a cable vault and fail to test the air.
In one case, the the vault was found to have very high levels of flammable gas. It was later determined it was because there was a natural gas leak in an underground pipe far enough away that the soil had actually filtered out the mercaptan odorizer.
That…was impressive! Amazed he survived!