Here’s a story that cracked my dad and I up!
A man who unknowingly built up a
40,000-volt charge of static electricity
in his clothes as he walked left a trail
of scorched carpet and molten plastic
in his wake and forced firefighters to
evacuate a building.
Frank Clewer, who was wearing a
woolen shirt and a synthetic jacket,
ignited the carpet when he walked into
a building in the Victorian country town
of Warrnambool on Thursday.
“It sounded almost like a fir-cracker,”
Mr. Clewer said.
“Within about five minutes the carpet
began to erupt.”
Employees smelt something burning and
phoned the firefighters, who evacuated
the building.
“There were several scorch marks in the
carpet and we could hear a cracking noise
- a bit like a whip – both inside and outside
the building,” said Henry Barton, a fire
brigade official.
Fire fighters cut electricity to the building,
suspecting there had been a power surge.
Mr Clewer, who had left the building
discovered that he had scorched the plastic
on the floor of his car. He returned to seek
the help of the fire fighters.
“We tested his clothes with a static electricity
meter and measured a current 40,000 volts,
which is one step shy of spontaneous
combustion,” Mr Barton said. “I’ve been fire
fighting for over 35 years and I’ve never come
across anything like this.”
The firefighters took Mr Clewers jacket to the
fire station where it continued to give off a
strong electrical current.
David Gosden, a lecturer in electrical engineering
at Sydney university, said that for a static
electricity charge to ignite a carpet, the conditions
had to be perfect.
“Static electricity is a similar mechanism to
lightning, where you have clouds rubbing
together and then a spark generated by very
dry air above them,” he said. It was very
unusual for static electricity to reach 40,000 volts.