Coming soon...

[personman]

... to a school or government building near you:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/11/12/fuel.tanker/index.html

It's no great mystery - they parked a beer tanker with the keys in the ignition down the road from a frat house...  (j/k!)

[SirBruce]

Uh, Breaker One-Nine, this here's the Rubber Mullah
You got a copy on me White Raisin? C'mon

Uh, yeah Ten-Four White Raisin, fer sure, fer sure
By golly it's clean clear to Flag-Town, C'mon

Uh, yeah, that's a big Ten-Four White Raisin,
Yeah, we definitely got us the front door good buddy,
Mercy sakes alive, looks like we got us a jihad

Was the dark of the moon, on the sixth of June
In a tanker, pullin' gas
Cabover Khalid with a reefer on
And Muhammed haulin' ass

We's a-headin' fer Bush on I-One-Oh
'Bout a mile outta Shaky-Town
I sez White Raisin, this here's the Rubber Mullah
An' I'm about to put the hammer on down

Cause we gotta little ol' jihad, rockin' through the night
Yeah we gotta little ol' jihad, ain't she a beautiful sight?
Come on an' join our jihad, ain't nothin' gonna git in our way
We're gonna roll this truckin' jihad, cross the USA
Jihad... Jihad...

Bruce

[Murgos]

For that bruce I grant you a "HA", you may keep it and use it for your very own free of charge subject to the terms of EULA.  Please note that I reserve the right to revoke my "HA" at any time and for any reason.

[Alkiera]

The 44-foot gasoline tanker was stolen in April from a parking lot in Pennsauken, New Jersey.

I thought that story souded familiar.  I heard about it in April here in New York.  I thought they'd figured the case out, or at least had a clue.  I'm not terribly worried.  It's a big country, and there's lots of perfectly good reasons to steal a tanker truck that don't involve terrorism...

Besides.  What're they gonna do with it?  Park it on the White House lawn?  Good luck with that.  Getting it anywhere near a large building in downtown NYC sounds like an exercise in frustration as well.

Really, now would be a bad time for stunts like that, from the radical islamists POV...  Public awareness of terrorism has dropped quite a bit in the US, another terror attack would just wake people up again, stir up all the 'carpet bomb the middle east' sentiment again.

Alkiera

[personman]

Jihad... Jihad...

Beautiful!

[Dark Vengeance]

I thought that story souded familiar.

Eerie...I just got done stealing a tanker full of gasoline in GTA:SA. Indeed there are lots of reasons for doing so.

Thanks to me, Carl Johnson did it for pussy, yo.

Bring the noise.
Cheers..................

[HaemishM]

If it was full, there are lots of places you could park it to do maximum damage, and lots better targets than the White House.

[daveNYC]

If it just had gas in it, their best bet would have been to drive it into a 4th of July parade.

[doubleplus]

Doesn't gasoline just burn? It has to be vaporized to explode.

[Murgos]

Vaporizing makes it burn easier.  It's why you can't actually pour gasoline on the ground and light it with a cigarette, as cool as that looks in the movies.  Cigarettes just aren't hot enough but anything will burn at the right temperature and pressure.  To get an explosion you must have a rapid burn, (that is technically the definition of an explosion, something that burns at a certain rate per second) so the lower the heat requirements the faster the burn the easier it is to make it explode.
 
Anyway, to make a fuel-air explosive (and thats what you would want to do to get the biggest boom) you would first want to explode it into a big misty spray and then you ignite it.  As with most things its a simple concept but rather difficult in execution.  I wouldn't be surprised to hear that when they find the missing tanker they find several charred corpses nearby and the remains of a test fuel-air explosive device.

edit:  Of course the same thing could be done with a truck full of flour or coal dust.  But a flour hijacking probably wouldn't get as much attention.

[Hanzii]

Vaporizing makes it burn easier.  It's why you can't actually pour gasoline on the ground and light it with a cigarette, as cool as that looks in the movies.  

I invite you to pour out a gallon of gasoline on the ground, stand in the puddle, take a nice pull on your cigarette and then drop it.
Be sure to post nice shots of your disfiguring burns here.


Just fyi gasoline burns at 232 degrees celcius - the temperature at the tip of a burning cigarette is between 400 and 700 celcius and gasoline has a flashpoint of -43 degrees celcius, which is what would make the experiment particulary dangerous.

Yes, you can make flour explode. No, it not the same, whether you vaporize coal, flour or gasoline - that's why the US Airforce use gasoline and not flour (which is both safer and easier to transport) in naplam and fuel air bombs.
I've blown up rooms full of gasoline and flour (you get to do fun stuff while training firefighters) - while both is spetacular, rest assured, that you'd note the diffrence.

[Murgos]

Gasoline has an ignition temperature of 800 degrees F (depending on the octane).

Lighted cigarette thats not been 'stoked up' 550 degrees F.



edit:  http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae1.cfm

were both sort of right, depending on the conditions it can go either way.

[SirBruce]

So this



never happened?

Bruce

[Samwise]

Bear in mind, Murgos, that gasoline is very volatile, and will vaporize to some extent if exposed to air.  I suspect that your figures are for gasoline that's very carefully contained in a sealed container.  If, say, you set off a small explosive in or around a tanker truck full of gasoline, sufficient to rupture the tank and start spraying gasoline into the air, you're not dealing with carefully controlled gasoline any more.

[Murgos]

If, say, you set off a small explosive in or around a tanker truck full of gasoline, sufficient to rupture the tank and start spraying gasoline into the air, you're not dealing with carefully controlled gasoline any more.

I conceeded that in the initial post.  The whole part where I talked about fuel-air explosives.

[Samwise]

The same is true if you pour gasoline onto the ground.  A puddle of gasoline has a lot of surface area, and will vaporize fairly quickly.  I strongly suspect it takes less than 800F to ignite it under those conditions.  (Your original post specifically called out a puddle on the ground as a case where gasoline would not ignite easily.)

[Abagadro]

The water content of gasoline will also have an effect on the cigarette (i.e. putting it out) so a lot depends on how long the gas has been there and the ambient air temperature.

I suggest various expirements with certain members of the board.

[Margalis]

Actually, I'm pretty sure that Napalm IS made out of flour, with a little yeast for the right rising action, and salt to flavor.

[Hanzii]

Gasoline has an ignition temperature of 800 degrees F (depending on the octane).

Lighted cigarette thats not been 'stoked up' 550 degrees F.



edit:  http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae1.cfm

were both sort of right, depending on the conditions it can go either way.

From your own damn link:

Temperature without drawing:
Side of the lit portion: 400 deg C (or 752 deg F)
Middle of the lit portion: 580 deg C (or 1112 deg F)

Temperature during drawing:
Middle of the lit portion: 700 deg C (or 1292 deg F)

The above numbers represent the average we obtained by performing several trials and can be considered accurate to within 50 deg C. A standard Fe-CuNi digital thermocouple thermometer was used in all trials.


The Autoignition Temperature of a standard unleaded gasoline can be anywhere from 260 to 460 degrees C (or 500 to 860 deg F) as quoted on the FAQ: Automotive Gasoline Web Page by Bruce Hamilton (this page is also an excellent and accurate resource about the science of gasoline)

So as you can see the temperature of the cigarette, even at the side of the lit portion, is more than enough to cause gasoline to autoignite.

Fahrenheit/celcius is hard and whatnot.

And it doesn't matter.
As I said, the FLASHPOINT of gasoline is  minus 43 degrees celcius. Which means that unlike you're in friggin' Siberia, the gasoline will be vaporizing like mad and therefore highly volatile.

Yes, it is positive to extinguish a lit cigarette by submerging it in gasoline - no, I wouldn't want to be within a 100 yards of you, when you tried it.

[Murgos]

were both sort of right, depending on the conditions it can go either way.

From your own damn link:

Temperature without drawing:
Side of the lit portion: 400 deg C (or 752 deg F)

At one end of the spectrum what I said was true, and I've seen numbers as low as 260 C (500 F) for the cigarette at other web sites while looking this up.  I choose the one I did because it did a better job of explaining the variance.

Unlike some people here I almost always try to provide references when I quote numbers.

I found several other sites (such as this one) that supported my initial claim but I found it to be untenable as there was too much variation between sites.

You can chalk this up as a victory if you'd like but the truth is that I WAS right, just not completely right.  I could have just linked to the sites that supported my claim and no one probably would have noticed.

[Hanzii]

Unlike some people here I almost always try to provide references when I quote numbers.

So did I.
Which part of my "having blown up both flour and gasoline for a living" didn't you believe?
Theoretical numbers are all well and good (even when they go against your original claim) - but practical experience beats it every time.

Anyway, what special effect do you think they used to film all those movie scenes you tried to disprove?
Yup gasoline and cigarettes - it's the cheapest pyrotechnics in the book, the only reason to use something else is ease of control and safety, because gasoline really is volatile enough to blow up shit using a cigarette for ignition.

Sometimes it's ok to concede gracefully.

To sum up. If you live in a government or other high profile building and see a fast moving gasoline trailer coming your way. Be somewhere else.
Flour trailer? Not so much.

[angry.bob]

Theoretical numbers are all well and good (even when they go against your original claim) - but practical experience beats it every time.

Except here and the Other site wich must not be named. In those two case, practical experience is anecdotal evidence and is immediatley discounted as a singular event, relevant only to you. Therefore, anything you yourself witness is completely irrelevant, even if you do it every day as your job. Now, if you can google up a link to a website some random asshat threw up that has some numbers on it, regardless of whether he made them up or not, that's real information.

[Ironwood]

Theoretical numbers are all well and good (even when they go against your original claim) - but practical experience beats it every time.

Except here and the Other site wich must not be named. In those two case, practical experience is anecdotal evidence and is immediatley discounted as a singular event, relevant only to you. Therefore, anything you yourself witness is completely irrelevant, even if you do it every day as your job. Now, if you can google up a link to a website some random asshat threw up that has some numbers on it, regardless of whether he made them up or not, that's real information.

And everyday you just keep earning the right to call yourself Angry.Bob.

But alas, you're right.

[Hanzii]

Theoretical numbers are all well and good (even when they go against your original claim) - but practical experience beats it every time.

Except here and the Other site wich must not be named. In those two case, practical experience is anecdotal evidence and is immediatley discounted as a singular event, relevant only to you. Therefore, anything you yourself witness is completely irrelevant, even if you do it every day as your job. Now, if you can google up a link to a website some random asshat threw up that has some numbers on it, regardless of whether he made them up or not, that's real information.

Heh. True.

Allthough I will often discount anecdotal evidence, what I'm really railing against is when people take other peoples claims of personal experience, usually posted on some weblog, and claims that proves stuff. "Look this guy writes he's been to Iraq and everybody is all fun and giggles!"

And there's a huge difference between the "I've seen democrats/christians/moslems/europeans/gunowners do X - therefore all democrats/christians/moslems/europeans/gunowners do X" and "I've seen gasoline do X numerous times, therefore gasoline does X" - personal experience.

[Shannow]

I apologize for the following....but I can't resist.

Nice flame war.

[HaemishM]

Someone needs to post the "Die in a car fire" picture.

Not that this isn't entertaining or anything, but it wouldn't have taken Amazing Kreskin to predict that this thread would degenerate into a scientific e-peen war of "Will it explode/won't it?"