On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Lois Luckovich wrote:

> > Today, I received this.
> >
> > The Petroleum Equipment Institute is working on a campaign to try and make
> > people aware of fires as a result of "static" (that is, static
> > electricity) at gas pumps. They have researched 150 cases of these fires.

While it's true that there have been fires attributed to static
electricity, this email is a hoax.  See:
http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/static.asp

A dead giveaway is this line:

> > The results were very surprising:
> > 1) Out of 150 cases, almost all of them were women.

Someone's taking a poke at women.  PEI's study never mentioned gender.

> > 5) Don't ever use cell phones or any other two way radio's / electronic
> > devices when pumping gas . (The RF energy from a cell phone (a radio
> > transmitter) can cause a sparking on bare metal, much like aluminum foil
> > in a microwave oven .

There's no evidence that this has ever happened.  Cell phones only put out
a few watts of RF power, not enough to cause arcing.  Your microwave oven,
on the other hand, puts out several *hundred* watts of RF.

There's more info on the web site I mentioned above.

             _ _
  __ _ _   _| | |  | David M. Brodbeck (N8SRE)              Ypsilanti, MI
 / _` | | | | | |  +-----------------------------------------------------
| (_| | |_| | | | @ cyberspace.org
 \__, |\__,_|_|_| "To the optimist, the glass is half full.  To the
 |___/             pessimist, the glass is half empty.  To the engineer,
                   the glass is twice as big as it needs to be."