Transporting 20 gallons of gas in your trunk and storing in your back yard in the open air question

We kept 5 gallons of gas on hand to replenish the 6-gallon tank on the generator. Seemed sufficient.

Then Hurricane Yikes came along and knocked 4 million people in our city into the no-power zone, including every gas station for fifty miles! For TEN FREAKIN' DAYS!

I now have a LOT of six-gallon gas cans.

The next time a hurricane heads this way, I'm gonna fill every blessed one of them! I'll stack 'em in the garage along with lawn chairs, pot plants, garbage cans, the dog, and anything else that might blow away in 80 mph winds. If the door-to-door gas-can inspector comes by, I'll lie or plead exigent circumstances.

Reply to
HeyBub
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Good point. Only thing you mentioned is I do have my bench grinder at the end of that bench. That bench is really 8' x 1 "x 6" boards I tied into the studs with 3

1" x 4" supports cut with 45 degree miters from the studs to the outer edges providing support. Extra lumber I had around. Real strong and open underneath except for the 3 angled supports. Good place to roll my floor jack out of the way, store jack stands and those jugs. Sparks shouldn't get near the gas jugs, but now that you've mentioned it, I could get them away from there, and will. Thanks. But I'm not moving my kerosene jugs!

I feel pretty much the same, but never smelled fumes, and the jugs have never popped a vent open. Now you've got me thinking that getting a little shed would be a good idea.

--Vic

Reply to
Vic Smith

Hehe. Those with generators and hurricanes have to look at it differently. Once electricity goes out widespread, everything is shot to hell. Had a 2 day outage here once. Seemed like the end of the world. Personally, I'd probably prefer just getting out of town to someplace civilized when such an outage happened, but you do what you gotta do.

--Vic

Reply to
Vic Smith

C4 does emit a poisonous gas when burned, but hey, you're in country, and there's VC within smelling distance, what's a little poisonous gas? Might even get an early discharge. From the Army, that is.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

And your point is? That there is no ignition source during a vehicle crash?

What is the temperature from a spark from a electrical wire, a bursting tail light, or steel dragging on the pavement? Is it over 833? I would think it is less, but still, a very effective ignition source. Electrical fires after collisions are common, even if they are not the spectacular variety. There's lots of hot melting wires and sparks.

No?

Reply to
Steve B

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I was an associate safety professional. Yes, you may cite OSHA all day long.

But you said containers of less than five gallons re: storage. What about transport? You say nothing about that.

Point is, 5 gallons, 25 gallons 60 gallons (see above), any regular guy who's been around the block a couple of times knows you can get in one hell of a mess with a cup of gasoline or less. I knew two guys who had their faces altered for life with less than a cup of gas.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

"Vic Smith" wrote

I hate two words. Should and probably.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

If you're going to get nitpicky, I will too. A BLEVE is a mechanical explosion; it does not require combustion at all. Water can BLEVE in the right container, as the Mythbusters have proven.

reply: I'm sorry, but you were the one picking nits and not being very specific about it, either.

I'm sorry if I confused you with specific terms.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

"Steve B" wrote

NO, sorry. You cited about 5 gallon containers for handling. Nothing stated there about storage.

Steve

Reply to
Steve B

no, there's actually a difference.

Reply to
Steve Barker

They're different.

"Should" implies a moral and superiority judgment on the part of one's self-appointed betters.

"Probably" is a dispassionate evaluation of the circumstances by a logical mind.

Reply to
HeyBub

Could just indicate indecision.

Unless it's just indecision. Anyway, I avoided both words - until now (-: A friend would sometimes answer a question with "Maybe I might." He just couldn't make up his mind.

--Vic

Reply to
Vic Smith

-snip-

Smell, hell! Mr. Charles could see us plain as day. We were on an OP about 400 feet above the surrounding rice paddies. He might have been somewhat deterred from taking us on regularly due to our 106 Recoilless rifle. OTOH, as I learned 30 years later, the NVA hospital within the mountain might have made us a 'quiet zone'.

Not my site- but here's a photo-

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'My' mountain is the bigger one in the top picture- the Marines called it Crowsnest. We even had a shower up there- made from an orange 55 gallon drum. [another surprise 30 yrs after the fact- I had never connected the orange barrel with Agent Orange- but our corpsman confirms that what it was]

Army couldn't discharge us- we're Marines.

Jim

Reply to
Jim Elbrecht

The point was to find whether gasoline, stored next to a fence, in approved

5-gallon containers, would ignite.

With an ignition temperature over 800 degrees F (MythBusters seems to think it's only 500 degrees F so I'm not sure why the descrepancy), it's not likely the gasoline will ever get hot enough, without a flame, to spontaneously erupt simply stored against the fence.

Stored in a vehicle truck bed or closed trunk (or in the vehicle gas tank for that matter), is a whole 'nother story because there could be leakage and sparks and friction after a crash. But, a crash is a crash and is a dangerous thing no matter what. If we're so worried about crashes, we'd never drive anywhere so we have to take that risk in hand.

Assume someone drives 15K miles a year, for 50 years, that's 750K miles in a lifetime. Assume in that lifetime, they have, how many? Maybe two, maybe three accidents? Let's say five accidents just to be aggressive.

That's an accident every 150K miles. But you don't store the gas in the trunk all the time; just to and from the gas station, which, for our sake, we'll call 15 miles round trip.

I'm not sure how to do statistics, but, 15 miles out of 150,000 miles seems like a percentage of about 0.01%. So, for any given fifteen miles that you're carrying gasoline in your trunk, you have a non-zero (but pretty small) chance of having an accident; and in that accident, you have a smaller (but still non-zero) chance of having it blow up on you.

All in all, unless someone comes up with better math, I think you have a better chance of having a heart attack than having your gas blow up on you on that one trip to the gas station.

Still, I can't find what the laws are for California for transportation. The Caltrans (DOT) site was miserable.

Reply to
LM

I'm trying. I'm trying. :)

My husband fills my car with gas all the time from Costo runs he makes with his car. He fills up his sedan plus four five-gallon cans at the Costco pump. The advantage is he waits on line once but gets to fill up two cars. The advantage to me is I never ever have to fill my gas.

So I'm also interested in the law. The Costco gas attendant can't possibly not be seeing him do this for years. They never say anything. Neither has anyone else. You'd think a cop or two would have been on line waiting at some point or another. Or the trucker who fills up the huge gas tanks would mention something.

Looking for the law, I scoured the Caltrans (fancy name for the California DOT) web site for hours. I can't find a single document that says what the law is for transport of gasoline in portable storage containers for personal use.

I'll keep looking. It frustates me that something so simple is so hard to find the law for.

Reply to
LM

I'm trying. I really am. I want to know myself what the law is.

I gave up on the California DOT (aka Caltrans) web site as its search mechanism is a mess.

I googled for "California law gasoline portable storage container transportation and storage"

It's really hard to find the law on storage and transportation of 5-gallon gasoline containers! :(

This PDF, for example, titled "Portable Storage Containers"

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) is typical in that it gives suggestions, but, only one law is mentioned related to storage, and it isn't what we're looking for (we're looking for a volume limitation).

It says "A safety can made of a heavy-gauge metal and having a cap that automatically closes to prevent a spill if the can is dropped or tipped over is required, under California Code of Regulations Title 8, Section

3319, for storing flammable liquids like gasoline."

So, I'm still looking for any California law that covers:

- How many gallons (if any limit exists) you can carry in your trunk

- How many gallons (if any limit exists) you can store 'along a fence'

We all know you can carry gas in your trunk; and you can leave it along your fence; the only question is whether or not there is a legal volume limit.

Reply to
LM

The point is, gasoline could sit out there safely for a very long time. In the sun. And not ignite from ambient heat. And never even get close. There's no arguing that point.

Then humans enter the equation, and, well, you know humans. And then, there is lightning. And in California, fires of different types. And, in California, people who smoke all sorts of things that burn.

All in all, if I were the OP, I wouldn't have a problem with it, unless it's by the house or garage or outbuilding, and then the OP is being careless and might get caught with his pants down one day. From the neighbor's POV, I can see why he might be a little concerned. I don't know if we ever established if the gas and fence location was near any house or structure, or out in the middle of acres of desert. I wouldn't want to see twenty gallons of gas on the other side of my fence if it was between the two houses. You probably wouldn't want to, either.

There are lots and lots of variables here. But the one constant is that gas is very flammable, and extremely easy to ignite by several normal every day methods, including static electricity from a poofy sweater.

AND, when it catches fire, it's usually nasty and leaves a big mess.

And melts plastic sweaters on to people in a heartbeat.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

Now I hate them even more. AND you.

Just kidding about the second part.

Steve

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Reply to
Steve B

i suppose you could devolve to an old fashioned method. do you have a phone? perhaps you could call them up.

frankly, if it's not a citable law, they can't write a ticket for it, making the limit be...as much as you want.

there really isn't a law or regulation for everything, even though it sometimes seems so.

Reply to
chaniarts

I think we've answered one of the questions: Is it all that dangerous to keep 20 gallons of gas in the back yard?

We all know that there are plenty of dangerous things we keep around our house (I have 1,000 gallons of propane in a tank ten feet away from the house, for example), and gasoline in portable storage containers is one of those things nearly every one of us has in our garage or shed.

As far as I've read in this thread, the only limits I have in storage (besides common sense) are the ones from OSHA which I'm well within.

But I don't think we have been able to answer the second question: Is it illegal to trasnsport more than 5 gallons (California) in a car?

I'm searching the California codes as we speak and can't find anything telling me how many 5-gallon gas jugs we can carry in the trunk of a car:

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Reply to
Bill Murphy

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