I narrowly escaped becoming a rolling ball of fire. Twice this has happened now.
The first time was when I was driving to work one day in my ancient Honda. As I drove I became aware of a raw petrol smell, never a good sign. I pulled in at work, and as it was lightly raining at the time my eye was caught by a trail of little rainbow blotches leading back from my car to the road. I opened the hood, and after a moment found that a little metal thing near the top of the engine which turned out to be the fuel filter had somehow cracked and was dribbling fuel down toward the alternator. I was moments away from becoming something out of a Bruce Willis movie.

The second time was about a year ago. I was moving a great distance, and couldn't realistically take my old Isuzu truck with me. It was old and rattly and not worth any money, so I gave it to a friend who wanted it. He drove it home and parked it in his driveway, and let it sit for a week or two before he went to use it. It was not wanting to start- which was very unusual for that truck, ordinarily it caught immediately- so he popped open the hood and checked everything he could think of, then tried it again. It started to catch, then he heard a pop. He got out and went to the front, where he found that the recirculation line had ruptured, spilling petrol across the alternator so that he now had a merry little bonfire in front of him. He ran to his garage and grabbed the fire extinguisher- which then proved to be faulty. By the time he got another one from the house the bonfire had grown big enough that there wasn't any point in trying to put it out, so he called the fire department to let them do it. We agree that the Isuzu was heartbroken over me leaving and committed self-immolation in its grief.

Apparently once a car gets past 200K miles I need to replace anything involving fuel lines that run near the alternator.
( Wanderer, Fri 5 Jul 2013, 4:48, Reply)