If, after all precautions are taken, you are visited by fire, stay to fight it. Get only far enough away to escape being burned, and then fight and fight hard. Work the fire extinguisher for all it is worth, for in less time than it takes to read this page the fate of your car will have been decided.
Get out of your head, first of all, the idea that there is to be an explosion. It doesn’t happen. The first puff from the burning gasoline is the nearest thing to an explosion you will see. After this first puff, it is fire, not explosion, you need fear and fight. Tanks will not explode unless empty of gasoline, or nearly so, and filled with gasoline fumes—that is, vapor and air mixed. Water is little good in fighting an automobile fire where gasoline and oil are burning.
There are several things, however, which will quench the flames, and which should be at hand. If you could get sand and salt in sufficient quantity on the flames it would be effectual, but of course one could hardly carry a sufficient quantity along. There are also tube extinguishers filled with a dry compound, which under favorable circumstances will do the trick. But the trouble is to get the compound at the seat of the fire, and to throw it violently upon the flame is impossible.
There is one thing, however, which will actually put out a gasoline fire, and it is such a safeguard that no owner can afford to be without it. That is the carbon tetra-chloride compound, which is the basis of all liquid extinguishers on the market. This, discharged close to the seat of the flames, forms a dense smoke-like gas which has no oxygen to feed the fire, which therefore goes out for lack of fuel. There are many good extinguishers on the market which use the carbon tetra-chloride mixture with other ingredients to keep it from corroding the pump, or to add some other quality to the compound. These extinguishers cost more than the dry compound tubes, but the man who can afford to own a car can afford to have the necessary appliances for its protection. One may never have occasion to use the fire extinguishers, but it is nice to know that they are ready if the emergency does come, for there isn’t always a fire department handy, and if there is, generally the firemen arrive after the car is doomed.
CHAPTER XXXIV
DEATH IN THE GASOLINE
Most persons understand the danger of getting gasoline and fire in close proximity, but there is another peril in gasoline which is not so well comprehended—indeed has only come to the attention of scientists in recent months. It is death, called petromortis, or gasoline death, which lurks in the fumes of the burned gases from the exhaust pipe.
That which comes from the exhaust is no longer inflammable. It has served its purpose in the combustion chamber by burning with rapid expansion, furnishing power. It has undergone chemical changes, has been split up, the hydro-carbon uniting for the most part with the oxygen of the air in the mixture and forming carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. The latter is carbonic acid gas, in which no living thing can live. The carbon monoxide is no less deadly, and besides there is the nitrogen from the air, which will suffocate as well, unless it mingles with the air freely.
These three gases exuding from the exhaust pipe into a confined space, such as a small garage, would quickly vitiate the atmosphere to a point where, close to the floor, asphyxiation would result, and sooner or later would fill the garage up to the point of the air intake. Then, as oxygen-filled air could not enter the intake to form mixture, the engine would slow down and stop.
There is little danger, since the deadly gases are heavier than air, when one is working about the garage in a standing posture, where the breathing apparatus would be above the strata of gases and taking in the normal air. But where one is working at the tires, or any part of the car below the level of the gases, or under the car, he might be overcome and die of suffocation in a few minutes.
It was not until such accidents really had occurred that the attention of the public was directed to this danger. Just recently a notable case of death from gasoline fumes was that of a popular actor. He was working in his garage, and because of the cold had the doors tightly closed. Getting under the car to adjust and oil the mechanism while the engine was running to warm it up, he was overcome by the gases which could not escape from the garage, and died before being discovered.