...that allowed excessive voltage to enter CWT through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system.
There's a key word missing here, and it's not pedantry to highlight it; that sentence should read "...that allowed excessive voltage to enter CWT through
faulty electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system.."
It's important because that takes us into the area of EWIS, and ageing EWIS in particular. It is arguable that the root cause of TWA 800 was deteriorated insulation in the loom that carried the FQIS wiring and the high voltage wiring to No 4 engine. (The probable condition of the sensor(s) was a contributory factor.)
I often wonder why manufacturers were ever allowed to place electrically driven equipment into fuel tanks; fuel quantity can be measured mechanically, and I have no doubt whatsoever that the assembled brainpower of the manufacturers in the 60s/70s and beyond could have devised a system that is at least as accurate as the electrical/electronic sensors they used, and continue to use now, if legislation had forced them to.
The problem of ageing EWIS goes far beyond Fuel Tank Safety, of course, and I cannot help feeling that EASA's AMC 20-21/22/23, and the equivalents around the globe, achieves very little in terms of real, substantial reduction of the hazard caused by ageing EWIS, let alone its elimination.
Removing the combustible content of fuel tanks, rather than seeking unsuccessfully to make ignition impossible rather than unlikely, will eventually eliminate the risk of fuel tank explosion. Speeding up that process requires major modification of aircraft that may still have 20 years of life, and no Government has the balls to demand it.
Effective measures to reduce the risk of a catastrophic failure resulting from EWIS failure (ie
insulation failure in EWIS) will probably have to wait until the catastrophic failure occurs in the USA or to an FAA-registered airliner, rather as the effective measures to prevent fuel tank ignition had to wait until TWA 800 exploded, after - as I recall - 16 or 17 fuel tank ignition events had occurred around the world in the preceding decades. Or something like that; memory is fickle.