Fertilizer Explosion

Don't know if it was Truman or Churchill that said "If you don't know history you are doomed to repeat it"
Texas is repeating the 1947 Texas City fertilizer explosion in Waco.

Don't think it has to do with the last one being forgotten, just the law of averages.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/17/17800341-we-need-your-prayers-hundreds-injured-in-explosion-at-texas-fertilizer-plant

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
-Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, known as George Santayana

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Awful, more deaths than all our mass shootings / bombings in the last 365 days.
I heard the toll is around 70. It will go up from there.

[youtube]ROrpKx3aIjA[/youtube]

My heart goes out to all affected!

neptronix said:

Awful, more deaths than all our mass shootings / bombings in the last 365 days.

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Joe Biden is already authoring the background check bill.

Wow, that looked like they were filming from plenty far away. Guess not. If I'm understanding it right, it flattened the town, which was 2 miles away.

Holy crap that's a big boom. Reminds me of the rocket fuel plant explosion in Nevada.

before timothy mcvey and the oklahoma city bombing, i was able to buy 900 lbs of anhydrous ammonium nitrate from a farm supply distributor in order to fertilize my lot after i cleared it of rock and burned off the yukka plants so i could mow it.

100 tons of rock later, after multiple rakings with the spring tooth harrow and drag plates i was able to put down the fertilizer to promote the grass growth.

i spread a tarp in the back of my pickup and they dumped the anhydrous ammonia into the bed of the truck with a front end loader. i shoveled it out into the fertilizer spreader on my neighbor's tractor and spread it all over about 4 acres to make grass grow and out compete with the yukka plants which have never really come back since i burned them down to the roots.

it is impossible to buy fertilizer like that now unless you are already registered with the fertilizer supplier.

this explosion was at a fertilizer plant. the 1947 freeport explosion was a cargo ship fully loaded with anhydrous ammonia. two orders of magnitude difference.

I saw this earlier and could not quite believe what I was seeing, the size and force from that blast must have caused so much damage and many many deaths, so very sad but you have to question the proximity of such a plant to the town and in particular the school and a nursing home? I don’t understand why this plant wasn’t isolated more from the local community, they have lots of space in Texas.

I hope there is no link between this and past events at Waco, there is no reason to suspect this other than the close proximity of the respective dates, I know from playing as kid with bombs the power of nitrate based fertilizers we used to make sugar and weedkiller bombs out of galvanized pipe, easy and deadly and that was with just a handful of the stuff.

I always used think the emergency services went overboard when keeping people away from fire and other incidents, as humans we are naturally inquisitive and I have tried in the past to sneak past the tape and take a peak at fires and other incidents, this video shows you just why you need to keep a safe distance from the incident, the poor kid in the back hollering at his dad to get out of here, & they were the lucky ones.

The biggest possible problem I see there (but this is all speculation, I have not seen a map of the plant) was that apparently a source of nitrate (may not even be ammonium nitrate, potassium nitrate is also used as a fertilizer) was close to the anhydrous ammonia storage tank(s) (IIRC, the media said that there were 3 AA storage tanks). Anhydrous ammonia is stored as a liquid under pressure, and if there is a hole, it will spray out rapidly. With the whole area heated from the fire, the AA is going to come roaring out. If the stream is directed toward the burning pile, it's going to disperse it, and then you have a whole bunch of gaseous fuel mixed with a whole bunch of tiny particles containing an oxidant, add the heat and you can't get much better conditions for rapid combustion (read: explosion) than that. It's rather amazing to me that things which seem so benign can cause so much damage under exactly the wrong conditions - even good old baking flour can cause a good explosion if you disperse it well into the air and supply a spark.

Cameron

I live 50 miles north of there. I felt it. It pushed the utility room door open. It doesn't latch firmly... but still.
Our dogs went APE. We were expecting a storm to arrive so I thought it was A violent wind gust and thought
" There it is ". In five minutes or less it all started scrolling across the bottom of the TV.

FIFTY MILES

The fertilizer plant had been there years and years before all of that
which was developed around it. Poor planning...small town.
They are getting lots of care and support from surrounding counties
and beyond. There is alot of Grief and alot of compassionate response
happening there.

They had stockpiled more Ammonium Nitrate than they were allowed to. I imagine it was to save the cost of fuel compared to using many smaller shipments. My question is why wasn't there a large berm (similar to a levee) between the town and plant? Even allowable quantities can explode.

When off-loading bulk quantities, a tremendous amount of static charge can accumulate, leading to a surprisingly large spark. I don't know if that was the culprit, but...this sounds like the type of company that was probably pretty lax on a variety of safety rules...Read about silo explosions, I was pretty surprised that wheat dust can explode from a large static spark.

spinningmagnets said:

My question is why wasn't there a large berm (similar to a levee) between the town and plant?

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Couldn't get the city or county permit? Nothing unusual about people pouting and saying they don't want it there.