Aug 13, 2022
The simple new puzzler. This one is simple.
This fellow pulls into a filling station, I guess you'd call them a gas station these days. And this fellow is driving a pickup truck.
And in the back of the pickup truck, he has a few gas cans, metal gas cans, which are empty, and he's going to fill them up so he can go back to the ranch and fill up the tractor, and the ATVs and the dirt bikes and the chainsaw and all that. So rather than take the cans out of the truck, which would be a lot of work, and wasted motion, he grabs the gas pump nozzle and jumps into the bed of the truck. And then he starts filling up the cans from there. From the bed of the truck.
The owner of the gas station from the other side of the parking lot sees this happening and he hears a noise. Everyone at the station hears a noise.
As the fellow was filling up one of the gas cans, the owner heard a noise. He comes running over to the truck saying, "Stop, stop! Don't do that!"
But it was too late. Something awful happened.
What happened? And why?
Okay, here we are. Guy with the truck, filling up his gas cans in the back of the truck. He's standing in the bed of the truck filling up these metal gas cans. The metal part is an important detail.
The owner of the gas station is in the parking lot, on the other side. He's probably trying to sell somebody a broken-down old car or something. He hears noises. He sees what the pickup truck guy is doing and yells, "Stop! Don't do that!" But it is too late. And something awful happens.
So here's what happens. The pickup truck guy starts filling one of the cans. Metal gas cans. And as we know, the fuel flowing into the canister is building up static electricity. We know that.
And unfortunately, he had one of those plastic bed liners in his truck. It seems like a good idea, right? It's good if you're going to carry manure, but not a good idea if you're going to fill up metal gas cans because the can didn't have the ability to discharge the static electricity that was building up.
And it started building up and building up and finally, enough static charge built up so that it discharged and ignited the gasoline and blew up the metal gas cans, the pickup truck, and everything in it.
And that's why those big trucks used to have the chain that dragged behind, not because it was any danger when the thing was in motion that it was going to be struck by lightning or anything like that. It's when the thing stopped, and it was dumping out or picking up fuel that there would be static electricity created and you wanted some way for that static charge to discharge into the earth, and be grounded.
So there you have it. Good one, I think.
