The consequence of a cell short in a parallel bank will be a partial discharge of the remaining batteries in the bank. Even so, a parallel bank with one shorted cell has enough capacity to use the radio, or crank an engine. The battery failures that we've seen are generally the result of neglect or mistreatment that is predicted or explained by the listed reference books. There are engineers at the major battery manufacturers who know their products better than anyone. We might hope that each of them would give us the benefit of that knowledge regarding the suitability of paralleling their products.
Any singular experiment is fraught with procedural errors.
A well designed experiment attempts to isolate all imaginable distortions with counter tests. Drawing conclusions from an experiment where chance can be a significant factor is equivalent to believing in elves. We report the data in Table 1 without claiming any significance. On March 7, at 2010 we removed three parallel batteries from the charger. They had been charged for 2 hours at 14.2 Volts.