Massive Car Explosion In Virginia Parking Lot Blamed On Faulty Fuel Tank

As far too many people who try to light a bonfire with it learn the hard way, gasoline likes to explode. Inside an engine, that’s usually a good thing, but in order to make the tiny explosions happen inside the engine, you’re forced to carry around a giant tank of it outside the engine. As long as everything goes right, that isn’t usually a problem, but when something goes wrong? Well, your car might blow up Hollywood-style, just like what happened with one car in a Washington, D.C.-area parking lot Thursday morning. 

The good news is, according to the Arlington County Fire Department, no one died in the explosion. In fact, there weren’t even any injuries. Had someone been walking nearby at the time of the explosion, it may have been a different story, but luckily, the exploding car only took out three other nearby vehicles and not any people. Of course, that sucks for the owners of all four cars, since they’re now burned to a crisp, likely along with everything inside, but ultimately, they’re just things, and things can be replaced. People, on the other hand, are much more difficult to replace, at least until we figure out better cloning technology.

Considering how close Arlington is to Washington, D.C., it would be understandable if you thought the explosion might have been intentional, but according to the fire marshals, they have yet to find signs of anything suspicious. They’re reportedly still investigating what caused it, but for now, they believe it was caused by a faulty fuel tank that had ruptured, leading to a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion or BLEVE. 

Basically, because of science, when a pressurized container full of a flammable liquid such as gasoline is heated, the pressure can get high enough that the tank ruptures, causing a leak. The sudden change in pressure causes the liquid to boil almost instantaneously, creating a rapidly expanding cloud of a now highly flammable gas. And if something sets off that highly flammable gas, you get a really big boom. 

Typically, BLEVEs are associated with propane tanks, but in this case, the fire department claims it happened with the exploding car’s fuel tank. Throw in a couple other gas tanks in nearby cars, and you have a recipe for disaster. As long as your car’s gas tank hasn’t been damaged, you probably don’t have much to worry about, but as you can see in the video above, it is technically possible for a parked car to just explode, seemingly randomly. Isn’t that fun to think about?