Here is a good article about fire risk with our buses.

[Zeroclearance]

http://www.cvsa.org/publications/guardian_4q07_supplement.pdf

I have a customer that has investigated a local Metro bus engine fire.   While doing a few searches I found this article/report.

[Len Silva]

I tried that link in both Firefox and IE and it caused both of them to crash.  I've been having some computer problems so maybe it's on my end.

[Zeroclearance]

Len, I just checked the link.  It works..   2.5meg PDF file..

[zubzub]

the linl is good but it's kind of bossy.  Takes over and starts downloading right away.  Good read though, Thanks

[Hi yo silver]

Zeroclearance,
I had no trouble downloading the link.  Thank you for sharing this info with us.  It is especially interesting to me.  Fire investigation was a responsibility of my former job before retirement, and I had the opportunity to investigate a number of fires involving new autos on rail cars, as well as fires in HD maintenance trucks. In at least two of those cases, the culprit turned out to be Battery Positive cables that were compromised by chafed insulation.  In the case of a railcar fire, 15 new autos burned when the battery cable was cut nearly in two by the harmonic balancer as the car was driven onto the railcar.  Fifty miles down the track, the fire was discovered by a trackside witness.  Once the locomotive engineer was signaled to stop and the fire department arrived, they proceeded to unknowingly spread the fire from one end of the deck to the other, beneath the cars on the lowest of the three levels by "floating" the brake fluid, transmission fluid, and gasoline on the water they applied to the fire.  The  original cause was found to be a bolt that was left out of a bracket that should have secured the cable to the frame adjacent to the engine block.

I guess the moral of the story for all of us is to conduct frequent, deliberate, visual inspections of everything in general. 

Along the subject of visual inspections; during my trip south last fall, I was helping an older man on the site next door hook up his toad one morning, when I noticed his hitch ball was loose.  When neither of us was able to free the loose but frozen nut under the ball, he said "don't worry about it, I'll fix that when I get where I'm going"!  Can you believe it?  And wouldn't you know, as he drove off, there was somebody else chasing him down because his antenna was still up!  This is me, shaking my head...

Dennis