Exploding Gas Cans Under Investigation

Youngstown, FLAn investigation is underway following a gas can explosion which left four people critically injured.

Clarence Feldman III, 47, Scott Henry Feldman, 44, Sonya Johnson, 65, and Dorsey McClelland, 33, were all severely burned during a family gathering in late February.

There have been other accidents involving exploding gas cans, with sometimes-tragic results. Critics of the gas container industry claim that the addition of a tiny, inexpensive flame arrester to consumer gas cans would go a long way to minimizing death and injury.

Most consumer-grade gasoline cans are manufactured without a basic safety feature that, some say, would cost literally pennies to include: a flame arrester. The latter is a small piece of wire mesh that is placed inside the spout of a gas can. The holes are narrow, extremely close together,” large enough to allow fluid to flow through, but narrow enough to ward against the migration of vapors.