I scanned a few pictures from an incident that took place quite a few years ago. We were headed out to do some lake diving and had the back of my truck loaded with all our dive gear. We were going to stay for the weekend so we had camping equipment as well. Now the speculation is that a camp stove, which might have had the small propane cylinder attached, was leaking and shifting or something caused a spark and the result is what you see.
We were traveling at about 65 miles an hour when I saw a flicker in the rear view mirror. As I turned to see what it was, flames erupted from under the tarp and the entire box was blazing. Needless to say, I slowed down as quickly as I could and drove into the steep ditch. As we were going in I told the other 2 in the truck to get ready to bail out and I pushed them out the open door as I was reaching for the drivers door handle and tried to open it without looking. I pulled the handle and the door was locked so I turned to pull up the lock when I saw flames wrapped around the cab past the side mirror. If the door had not been locked, I would have opened it because I was looking at the passengers as I pushed them out. It was very windy and as you can see from one of the pictures it kept the flames pushed toward the front of the truck with little damage to the rear. So. I scooted out the passenger door and headed toward the other two in an open field.
It took about 5 or 6 minutes for the first burst disk to blow. The fire was blazing by this time, fueled by the high wind. The first tank that went was right behind where I was sitting in the drivers seat. It was pointed toward the cab and was like a huge blow torch that broke the back glass and blasted through the cab and out the open passenger door. It sounded like a jet engine. Pretty scary. The other tanks took longer to go, I had to have the Fire crew from the nearest town stand back when they arrived about 15 minutes later because there were 2 left to blow. They all got a kick out watching those tanks go and waited until #10 went before they tried to put out the fire. The car that behind us stopped for the show and they told me they had never seen anything like it, when the fire erupted they thought the cab was gone because they could not see us through the flames.
I'm not sure how hot it got but as you can see the tanks remained intact. We lost all of our gear. The lead was melted to the bed of the truck and you can see what is left of a reg on top of the tanks. All the equipment was replaced but the most important thing is that we were all OK. This is the reason I have a lot of faith in scuba tanks.
Oh, the firemen did find a bottle of rum that was not broken and gave it to us. Tasted a bit smoky, but we all needed a drink.
