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Date:         Tue, 1 Nov 94 13:24:05 PST
Sender:       Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:         macklow@sybase.com (Jim Macklow)
Subject:      Re: for campers: Propane Safety

<article about propane safety deleted>

Does anyone have any first-hand knowledge of incidents where propane caused a horrendous explosion? I think that the our schnozzes are pretty good at detecting the rotten egg smell, so good that it's pretty hard to stay where there's a big enough leak to cause an explosion. My experience:

Not reminisce about my college days, but here I go again...

Being poor, like "all" college students, I needed a cheap place to live. My wife wanted a dog, so we got one, and thus got kicked out of our apartment. While searching for a place to live, I came upon an ad for a mobile home for $900. I went and looked at it, and it was a 1951 32x8 trailer (this story takes place in 1989). It had a tar-paper shack attached at the rear, to make another bedroom.

On to the propane angle. The stove was a propane stove, and when we went inside to look over the trailer, it was pretty smelly. Now the owner was Chemical Engineering Phd candidate, and he owned dog, and he smoked like a chimney. We didn't know if the smell came from the dog, the cigarettes, the clothes strewn about, the unwashed dishes, or _him_.

We ended up purchasing the trailer to live in, and even after he moved his stuff out, the place still was smelly. Using my nose, I narrowed down the source to the stove. Since I worked at the Environmental Health department, I had access to lots of gadgets, one of which was a combustible gas detector. I borrowed it, and tracked down the leak to the oven's temp valve. I took apart the valve, and discovered that the grease that sealed it in the dim past was dry and cracked. I greased the valve, put everything back together, and stopped the leak.

At the time, I wondered how this guy managed to survive in that tiny trailer, with a propane leak, and him lighting up every five minutes?

My only conclusion was that you need a lot of propane leaked in order to get combustion. Or maybe the smoke from his cigarettes displaced all the oxygen?

As always, Safety First!

-Jim


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