N.J. mall evacuated when sound of car fire mistaken for gunshots

[The Straight Story]

Police evacuated a mall in New Jersey on Saturday night after people mistook a car explosion for gunfire, a law enforcement official said.

Panic ensued at Westfield Garden State Plaza Mall in Paramus, with some taking to Twitter to say a shooting had occurred.

A car's battery or fuel tank caught fire and caused a small explosion, creating the noise some people mistook for gunfire, a law enforcement official told CNN

"Due to that car fire ... smoke started entering the mall there," Lt. Kenneth R. Ehrenberg of the Paramus Police Department told CNN affiliate WABC.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/11/us/new-jersey-mall-incident/index.html

[Eleanors38]

1. I ran into this 30 yrs ago when I ran a mobile mechanic bix...

Got a call to fix a Japanese exchange student's disabled Mustang in the middle of the University of Texas campus. I arrived, opened the hood, and found the top of the car's battery had blown off (batterys produce hydrogen gas as a by product, and if concentrated, it can be "blown up" by an errant spark from loose cables, or an internal short). "It was so loud, and everybody stared at me," said the bewildered student.

It was then I noticed the older university staff and students staring back from the windows of the looming Texas Tower from which Charles Whitman had massacred so many folks some 25 yrs earlier.

[pacalo]

2. The first car I had was a second-hand Ford Pinto

which didn't explode, but it had the most awful sputtering backfire that sounded very much like gun shots whenever accelerating to go up an incline. ('Find me a hole...' was my feeling exactly.) Those were tamer times, though, compared to today's world.

I thought of that when I misread "car fire" in your subject line as "backfire".

I'm glad the NJ driver wasn't injured.

[Supersedeas]

3. a sign of the times