Maybe its just too easy for it to happen. The fumes could have been set off by a weak spark....I seen that static electricity can cause fires at a gas station. Not too much here where its damp but out West were its dry outside.
The N.Y. Times ran a story a few weeks ago, you need to subscribe to get it, so I print some of it...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/27/automobiles/27STATIC.html?ref=automobiles
IF you think gas prices are scary, consider a far worse fright that Kelly Shager of Lynchburg, Va., got at a gas pump. Eight months ago, Mrs. Shager drove her 1999 Ford Ranger to a self-service gas station, engaged the nozzle’s hold-open clip to have it fill automatically, then sat in her vehicle.
When the tank was full, she slid out and reached for the nozzle. Touching it, she felt a shock.
“Then fire kind of came out of the tank,” she said.
Mrs. Shager ran into the station’s convenience store for a fire extinguisher, but flames were already leaping over her truck. By the time firefighters controlled the blaze, the pickup was a charred ruin.
According to Greg Wormser, the Lynchburg fire marshal, the fire was ignited by an electrostatic charge that had collected on Mrs. Shager as she sat in the truck. When she reached for the nozzle, the charge grounded, igniting the gas vapors around the pump.
“You should never re-enter a vehicle when you’re fueling,” Mr. Wormser said.
That’s because a person who re-enters a vehicle and slides across the seat can acquire a static charge of thousands of volts, caused by friction between two electrically dissimilar materials, such as clothing and seat upholstery, said Dr. Robert E. Nabours, an electrical engineer. If the charge is not harmlessly discharged through the person’s shoes or by the person touching metal, such as part of a grounded car, an electrical arc can jump from a hand to the nozzle, igniting gas vapors and starting a fire.
There is no way to know precisely how many such incidents occur. The National Fire Data Center, part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has not studied the issue. But the Petroleum Equipment Institute, a trade group, found that there were at least 170 static electricity fires at gas stations from 1992 to 2006. Considering that the American Petroleum Institute estimates that there are 11 billion refuelings in the United States a year, the problem probably isn’t a big one.
Unless, of course, it’s your car that has burst into flames. Since Mrs. Shager’s pickup was destroyed in November, at least two other serious fires at gas stations have been attributed to static electricity, including one that severely burned a woman.
The culprit seems to be the hold-open clips on nozzles that allow drivers to pump gas hands-free and re-enter the car to, say, keep warm. All three fires involved motorists who had been inside their cars while their tanks were filling.
Because of this, the clips are banned in some places, including throughout New York, where state, county and city fire codes prohibit them, but allowed or even mandated in others. Fire officials do not agree whether the clips endanger consumers or protect them
