WASHINGTON – A bill inserted into the major spending legislation that President Donald Trump enacted on Sunday will require portable fuel containers, including plastic gas cans, to include “flame mitigation devices” to help prevent explosions from spreading. light up inside them.
The “Portable Fuel Container Safety Act 2020 ” sets” performance standards for explosion protection of portable fuel containers near flames or other sources of ignition “and guides the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission ( CPSC) to “enact a final rule to require flame mitigation devices in portable fuel containers” in the next two and a half years.
A report issued by the Chamber’s Energy and Commerce Committee to accompany the original version of the proposed legislation in 2019 cited the conclusions of a 2013 NBC News investigation into portable plastic gasoline containers.
The NBC News investigation found that, under certain conditions, the containers were susceptible to explosions that could cause severe burns.
The new law comes after a long battle to force the container industry to add such devices to plastic gas cans and other fuel containers. Over the past few decades, more than 80 lawsuits filed on behalf of the plaintiffs have claimed that portable gas cans have exploded and caused severe burns, some of them fatal.
One of the lawsuits was filed by Karen Kornegay, from Louisiana, whose 19-year-old son Dylan died in 2010 after suffering severe burns to 80% of his body. A can he used to light a fire supposedly exploded and sprayed burning gas.
Although Kornegay acknowledges that her son should not have used a gas can to light a fire – as the container industry warns never to do – she told NBC News that she believes the container design is to blame for the severity of her injuries.
The Kornegay and others case alleged that the containers were unsafe and defective, susceptible to flashback explosions because their designs did not include any flame mitigation devices.
A flashback explosion can occur when vapor escaping from the can comes in contact with a flame or spark. The vapor can ignite and “flashback” inside the can.
A type of flame mitigation device, called a “flame arrestor”, which is usually mesh pieces or discs with holes designed to stop the flame, is used in metal “safety” gas cans, fuel tanks and some containers of other flammable liquids, like some brands of coal lighter fluid and even some bottles of alcoholic beverages. But until the new law there was no federal requirement for some portable fuel containers.
Kornegay was overjoyed to learn that changes to the project had become law. “If I could be speechless, I would be speechless, because it is something that weighed so heavily on my heart,” she said. “We remember all the children, adults and people with whom it happened.”
Another mother, Margrett Lewis, of Sonoma, California, was a driving force behind the passage of the new law. One of her twin daughters was badly burned when she and her sister tried to spill a fireplace fuel product into an unventilated fireplace from a container with no flame arresters.
According to Dep. Mike Thompson, D-Calif., Who sponsored the original legislation in 2019, Lewis “defended the drafting and passing of the bill”.
“Flame accidents have tragic consequences, but the solution is less than ten cents and cheaper than ten cents,” Thompson said in a press release released by his office.
“It’s bittersweet,” said Lewis in the same statement. “This law, too late to save my daughter from the horrors of a burn unit, guarantees that each year, [thousands] will be protected from tragic burns and death. I am so proud of her and her twin sister for moving on. “
Contacted by phone this week, Lewis went straight on in describing his motivation. “I can’t allow anyone else to burn,” she said.
The 2013 NBC News investigation reported tests that the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts carried out with support from the gas can industry – to see if the portable plastic gas container was susceptible to flashback explosions.
The test results showed that under certain limited conditions – including a very low volume of gasoline left inside – such explosions are possible.
The day after the NBC News investigation aired on TODAY and posted on NBCNews.com, the CPSC asked manufacturers to add flame arresters to plastic gas cans.
Following the NBC News investigation, WPI continued two additional testing phases, also with industry support, to determine whether flame mitigation devices, such as flame arresters, could help prevent explosions.
These tests found it to be so, concluding in 2016 that mitigation devices are “necessary” to deal with possible explosions and reporting that some prototype designs for the devices have passed safety, durability and functionality tests.
Ali S. Rangwala, the Fire Protection Engineering professor who conducted the tests in the WPI combustion laboratory, is satisfied with the new requirement.
“I am so happy,” he told NBC News in a text, “that the work we have done now has been made law.”
The industry had already agreed to a new technical standard two years ago, in late 2018. A committee made up of industry representatives, consumer safety advocates and CPSC officials established “performance requirements for Flame Mitigation Devices (FMDs) in portable fuel containers “. “A flame mitigation device,” he said, “must be provided at each opening of the PFC to protect the opening (s) of the container from the possible spread of a flame in a flammable fuel-air mixture within the container.”
Reporting on this development on its website, the Portable Fuel Container Manufacturers Association noted that containers that meet the standard “are already being produced”.
PFCMA said its member manufacturers started “the introduction of flame mitigation devices in almost all of their PFCs starting about three years ago” in 2017. He said he “enthusiastically supports the new law as part of our members’ unwavering focus on the safety of its products for consumers “and described the addition of the flame mitigation device as” an extra safety measure for consumers who, despite common knowledge of the risks, misuse gasoline to start or accelerate a fire. “
PFCMA emphasized that consumers should never use gasoline to start or accelerate a fire.
The law signed on Sunday includes a long term, requiring the CPSC to make its final rule “no more than 30 months” after the law’s enactment date. It also includes an “exception”, stating that the requirements of the “volunteer [industry] standard … be treated as a consumer product safety rule “if the CPSC determines that they meet the conditions of the law.