Worst Case scenario

A Day in the Life of a welder could have been a guy with a torch

The men were doing welding work on a 46-foot metal-frame dredger that been drydocked, Moore said, when two nearby 80-gallon fuel tanks caught fire and exploded.

The force of the blast sent one of the tanks over a fence, landing near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks

http://today.seattletimes.com/2012/0...ballard-locks/

Fuel tanks are no joke to work with. In highschool my shop teacher gave me a gas tank that had been punctured by a rock and asked me to weld it back shut. he told me he had left it sitting outside for a week after pumping out the gas. I took a wire wheel to it to clean the area around the hole and suddely it went WHOOMP! and shot a jet of fire out the hole and out the fill hose fitting!

tank jumped a few feet up in the air and ended up bulged out and swollen so bad it was useless.

Scared the hell out of me and now If I have to do anything to a gas tank that involves heat or friction I hook a hose to a cars exhaust and let the exhaust blow into the filler neck the whole time I am working.

Heres to hoping those 2 guys make a speedy recovery!

vapors can even be hiding in the silt that settled to the bottom. NEVER mess with a tank, unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing. I didn't get to see the article here, did it say why the tanks exploded?