Originally published April 6 2005
Cell phones do not cause explosions, according to researcher
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
University of Kent researcher Adam Burgess states that stories about cell phones causing explosions or fires at gas stations is nothing more than a myth. Burgess rationalizes that stories started circulating in the late 1980s when cell phone use was banned as part of efforts to increase safety in the oil industry. An increase in petrol-station fires in the late 1990s and the easy proliferation of fake data over the internet further spread the myth.
DO MOBILE phones cause explosions at petrol stations?
That question has just been exhaustively answered by Adam Burgess, a researcher at the University of Kent, in England.
For the concern rests not on scientific evidence of any danger, but is instead the result of sociological factors: it is an urban myth, supported and propagated by official sources, but no less a myth for that.
Mobile phones started to become widespread in the late 1980s, when the oil industry was in the middle of a concerted safety drive, Dr Burgess notes.
This was, in large part, a response to the Piper Alpha disaster in 1988, when 167 people died in an explosion on an oil platform off the Scottish coast.
The safety drive did not apply merely to offshore operations: employees at some British oil-company offices are now required to use handrails while walking up and down stairs, for example.
So nobody questioned the precautionary ban on the use of mobile phones at petrol stations.
By the late 1990s, however, phonemakers---having conducted their own research---realised that there was no danger of phones causing explosions since they could not generate the required sparks.
One problem, says Dr Burgess, is that the number of petrol-station fires increased in the late 1990s, just as mobile phones were proliferating.
He concluded that most were indeed caused by sparks igniting petrol vapour, but the sparks themselves were the result of static electricity, not electrical equipment.
It is caused by friction between driver and seat, with the result that both end up electrically charged.
The safety of mobile phones would appear to be not so much the province of the hard science of physics, as of the soft science of sociology.
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