Burning cardboard rubbish 
2003 Reader Submission
Pending Acceptance
Your Latrine story with the plywood reminded me of something I did in my teens.
The incident is remarkably similar, although happily it was nowhere near as large as this report, but the main cause of *both* problems was that petrol vapour is heavier than air.
This happened about 1970 or thereabouts. I was working after school and weekends at my father's service station in order to make pocket-money, and anyway, it was practically expected in a family-run business.
I remember that the day was grey and there had been that particularly miserable drizzle (which you get in southern Victoria, Australia during winters) on and off during the day that made things completely damp, although you couldn't actually dignify it by calling it rain.
Part of my job was doing tidy-ups. This was a mixture of sweeping and washing the painted concrete garage floors and drives, restocking oil cans (they were in cans, not plastic bottles in those days), and generally removing and disposing of things like the cardboard boxes that the oil came in, old parts, split radiator hose and things like the oiled, soiled cotton ragging we used for hand-cleaning and part clean-up.
So, one day I was taking the burnable stuff to the middle of the vacant block next door which we owned, sitting in the middle of which we had a 44-gallon (200-litre) drum standing upright with the top cut out for burning stuff. (You can see where this is leading...) Of course to aid the burning process, there were probably 8 to 10 air-holes punched with a pick-axe (about an inch or about 3cm square) around the base of the drum at ground level.
So I'd taken out the week's burnable rubbish (this was before EPA stopped people burning rubbish in their yards), and shoved it and crushed it into the 44-gallon drum. Typically, there was some shoving to get a week's rubbish in there, so it was pretty well packed when I tried to light it. Of course, the drizzly rain had made things rather damp, and I couldn't get the thing to light.
y main duty however, was in fact to pump petrol – this is before self-serve bowsers (pumps), and certainly before electronically priced bowsers. So while I was doing my tidy up, I'd be constantly returning to service customers, which you could figure would take around 2 to 4 minutes each.
So far we have: a grey clinging-wet day, a 44-gallon drum with packed, wettish rubbish in it, and intermittent gaps while I did this.
When the rubbish was hard to light, I had several times before gotten a tin with a splash (certainly less than a cupful) of petrol in it, drizzled it over the rubbish and lit it. Once burning, even heavy rain wouldn't put it out – the packed nature of the 44-gallon drum made things burn completely to ash.
So I'd drizzled some petrol over the cardboard and rubbish, and, as luck would have it, I'd forgotten the matches, probably back beside the cash register in the service station. But secondly, as luck would have it, I must have serviced two or three cars when I returned to the service station, so it was probably at least 5 minutes later that I returned to the drum with matches in my hand.
Remember how I said that petrol vapour is heavier than air?
When I got back to the drum, I noticed that there was no visible petrol-wetness left on the cardboard (water-wetness looks different). So I struck a match, and fortunately for me, tossed it, rather than placed it, into the drum.
So we've got a open-topped 44-gallon drum, full of cardboard and other rubbish, with about ½ a cup of petrol, now mostly petrol vapour, which has sunk to the bottom of the drum, and has nicely mixed with the air owing to our thoughtfulness of putting some air-holes around the base of the drum.
Well, the whole thing went "Whump!" – it was beautiful. Now I know exactly how a mortar works: a small propellant charge beneath some tightly packed object in a big pipe. But I didn't have *one* object in my 'pipe', I had lots of petrol-dowsed cardboard, oily cotton rags, and other bits and pieces all flying majestically upwards, a goodly percent of which were quite well alight. Being cardboard and other aerodynamically slow things, they seem to hang in the air for some time, before drifting, still burning, down over the vacant lot.
Once I got over the mouth-opening shock of it, I ran around with a garden rake or broom (don't remember which) trying to put out all the bits of burning stuff now scattered over half the vacant block.
y two bits of luck were that the knee-high grass was damp, and wouldn't sustain a flame, and that I didn't have my big boof-head over the drum when I tossed my match in.
Submitted on 03/27/2003
Submitted by:
Alf Lacis
Reference:
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