Bus explodes

A Bangkok city bus converted to run on natural gas for vehicles (NGV) city bus exploded on Friday morning as the driver was filling its fuel tank. The explosion damaged five vehicles and injured a worker at the station.

A station attendant who was just about to turn off the gas and remove the filling line was injured, apparently when debris from the tank struck him in the legs. Word of his condition was not immediately available. There were no passengers on the bus during the filling operation, and the driver was standing to the side of the vehicle when the tank exploded.

The explosion shattered the windshields of several vehicles lined up for their turns at the pump.

Police said that the records for the vehicle indicated that the fuel tank did not meet minimum standards for the conversion. The gas cylinder installed on the bus was part of a shipment imported from China as used products, and may have been too old for use, police said. It burst under the pressure, they said.

Police also said the bus records indicated that the operator of the bus had not received permission from Bangkok or Land Transport Department officials to convert the vehicle from diesel to gas.

The rapid rise in the price of fuel has impelled many drivers and commercial operators to rush to convert petrol and diesel vehicles to various types of gas. This has cause some chaos, as unqualified mechanics and garages have cashed in on demand by providing unstable and sometimes dangerous conversions.

The Bangkok Post warned last month that illegal conversions were dangerous.. "Using household cylinders in vehicles is no different from a ticking time bomb," according to Chairat Sa-nguansue, acting director-general of the Land Transport Department.

Here is a selection of comments from various Internet forums immediately after the accident:

We have been warned for a long time that the installation and inspection process for NGV and LPG powered cars is, like most everything else here,

Expect more of this as more people switch to these volatile fuels, particularly after they have the conversions done on the cheap.

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Regulation of vehicle gas installations in Thailand is all but non existent.

Gas should be no more volatile than petrol. Obviously there was a leak from the tank. This would be about poor installation standards, I imagine, not about the general safety of gas.