That was a strange experience… Last night I called the fire department after discovering a slow leak from the backyard propane grill. I’d cleaned it earlier in the day, scrubbing off accumulated grease spatters, and in doing so apparently managed to turn one of the burners slightly to “on.”
Later I smelled an odor that I thought was a dead animal. Looked around under the shrubbery to see if Ratty might have croaked over someplace in the yard (some people put out rat poison, which you’d like your dogs not to eat when the victim comes crawling into your yard to die…). Nothing. But by the time the dogs went out for their final patrolling of the yard, around 9 p.m., the odor was clearly propane.
So I called the firemen. The dispatcher wasn’t sure it was necessary to send anyone. He said propane is lighter than air and quickly dissipates.
That was not my understanding. Years ago, I read a Consumer Reports article that said propane is heavier than air, that it can linger for quite a while and will collect in low-lying areas, and that if you live uphill from a neighbor, your leaking propane can flow downhill and accumulate at the neighbor’s place — and explosions have occurred in which a neighbor’s leaking propane drifted downhill and blew up in someone else’s property.
The air was still. No breeze at all was moving. And when I went back into the house from the front patio to get the dogs’ leashes, I could smell propane inside the house, especially in the kitchen.
When I mentioned that the interior smelled of propane, the guy decided to send a crew.
They looked around, turned off and disconnected the tank, and loved up the frantically affectionate corgis. They repeated what their dispatcher had said: that propane is lighter than air. Then they went away.
Huh. Propane is lighter than air, eh?
No.
It’s.
Not.
Some training these guys have had, somewhere, has misinformed them. I wonder what else they’ve been told that’s not true?