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Safety Alert: Static Electricity in Petrol Stations
If any of you have doubts about whether a GSM can cause a fire at a filling station, have a look at what a small static charge can do. This is real footage taken by a security camera. The girl causes a static spark simply by rearranging her clothing while standing too close to the vapour being expelled from the fuel tank.

Additional Comment from CSM/15
Yes it can happen, but restricted to cold weather areas, (Note by the video that it is 8 at night in December in either a European or North American Filling Station), cold, dry weather being far more conducive to increasing static charges; She also reentered her car during filling and then re exited thus recharging herself with static-not a wise thing to do. There were, according to one US website 74 cases of static sourced fires at US filling srations in 2003, (all in cold dry weather, all drivers reentered their car during filling)--a very miniscule percentage of the hundreds of millions of vehicle refilling operations annually in the US.
Here in the ME according to our retailers there is not one recorded instance of a static charge induced fire; warm temps., too humid, nylon and synthetic fibres not popular, and generally there are pump attendants, negating the habit of reentering and exiting the vehicle during refilling. Nevertheless this is a good example of what even one spark can cause, which could have been emitted from a GSM and the consequences of such an event.


Category:Second AlertsDocument Type:Road Safety
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