Derek Neary
Northern News Services

Fort Simpson (Feb 01/02) - There's a crater in the ice and snow in Troy Bradbury's driveway.

It was created last Tuesday when the gas tank exploded on a 1999 Ford F-250, which had been idling outside his home.

Bradbury was inside his house at the time, letting the truck, property of the NWT Power Corp., warm up on a bitterly cold -43 C morning.

When his wife alerted him to the situation, Bradbury scrambled outside and jumped inside the truck. He slammed it into reverse and accelerated back into a snow bank in hopes of extinguishing the flames and avoiding having his nearby garage also catch fire.

Although he credited the fire department for its rapid response, by the time they arrived on the scene several minutes later the truck was already a write-off, as were the thousands of dollars worth of tools inside, Bradbury said.

Lars Eif, chief of defects investigations for Transport Canada in Ottawa, said Transport Canada would look into the incident.

There were two similar incidents in the NWT last winter, one of which occurred in Fort Simpson when the gas tank exploded on a 2000 Chevy Astro van. Transport Canada closed its file on that particular investigation, according to Eif.

"Basically it was determined to be an isolated incident," he said Friday. "GM certainly wasn't aware of any others like that in a decade and a half of operating with plastic gas tanks."

Static theory debated

In Norman Wells, a Chevy K-1500 pick-up truck belonging to Imperial Oil also caught fire on a cold December 2000 day. Imperial Oil subsequently installed static straps on all its vehicles as a precautionary measure, attributing the incident to the possibility of a static charge sparking the fire.

Eif said Transport Canada also examined the wreckage of that vehicle.

"Again, that one was a real head-scratcher," he admitted. "We basically hit a dead end on that one."

He said the static electricity theory has been ruled out in both of the aforementioned investigations. Yet cold temperatures and low humidity in the NWT are conducive to static electricity , making it important to ground gas tanks, he noted.

Warnings against filling loose jerry cans with gasoline while on plastic truck bed liners -- also prone to static electrical charges -- involve different variables, as those jerry cans are not grounded, Eif said.