Fun time in Houston tonight

[KirkVining]

One of our chemical plants just exploded spectacularly. You could feel and hear the blast all over town. Big mushroom cloud. Doesn't look like terrorism but has freaked out the whole place. There was a shift working in the plant at the time but there is no word of casualties yet. Looks like the place is going to burn to the ground. If you use a lot of car wax, you might want to stock up.

[engatwork]

khou.com has some live feed.
Seems it is the second blaze at the plant within the past year.
Chemicals can be dangerous ya'll.

[KirkVining]

Pretty unusual fire. Seems natural gas seeped into a huge above ground tank of some precursor chemical used in wax products. The tank went with a hell of a boom that was heard 30 miles outside of Houston, and after that everything else in the area got splashed with hot burning wax, so warehouses. etc all started going up as well. They are not even bothering to fight it, they are just going to let it burn itself out. I took a drive out to see it, and given the size of the fire and the continuing explosions, its a wonder no one got hurt.

[Kuan]

We had a fire yesterday at a butter plant in New Ulm, Minnesota.

Nearly 180 employees of the AMPI plant, one of the nation's largest butter packagers, were put out of work at least temporarily after a fire that began in a cooling storage area Wednesday night destroyed about half the building, sending an estimated 1 million pounds of melted butter coursing down city streets and sewers in this southern Minnesota city.

The butter that escaped eventually worked its way to the Minnesota River, several blocks away.

Neve said MPCA officials arrived on the scene late Wednesday. By midday Thursday they had, through the use of containment booms, recovered some of the butter that had made its way to the water.

"Some butter got to the river, but we got some of it back," Neve said. "The good news is, we do not consider this to be a significant environmental problem."

More here: http://www.startribune.com/stories/462/5115140.html

[Pete Geither]

Our son is a chemical engineer at one of the plants in the Houston area. I don't think they make waxes though, but I haven't talked to him yet. Sure hope he wasn't involved.

[engatwork]

Seems natural gas seeped into a huge above ground tank

hmmm, it'll be interesting to hear the rest of this story. Unless the tank was built to store natural gas I can't think why anyone would intentionally pipe it to it. This raised some eyebrows around this house. Keep us posted kv.

[MS Fowler]

Chemicals can be dangerous ya'll.

Isn't that true!
I did some construction inspections a few years ago on an addition to a local cosmetics plant. This addition was STOUT. 12" CMU walls, poured solid with grout. I asked about it. I was told it was to house a dangerous process and it was meant to contain any possible explosion. Yesh, I want to work there!

[BobK]

I always liked the roof in our oil storage room at a place I used to work. The roof was designed to lift off and then settle back pretty much where it came from. Sort of a presure relief valve. I tried not to be in there much. And really, mostly we just had 90w gear oil in there.

[KirkVining]

Originally Posted by engatwork

hmmm, it'll be interesting to hear the rest of this story. Unless the tank was built to store natural gas I can't think why anyone would intentionally pipe it to it. This raised some eyebrows around this house. Keep us posted kv.

Houston has gas piplelines all over the place, some of them enormous. We even have a couple of subterranian dirt submarines roaming around underground drilling even more pipelines 24/7. People in the neighborhood, apparently not very smart people because they didn't report it to the authoritiies, said they smelled natural gas all day. The tank that exploded with incredible ferocity was supposedly empty, indicating some kind of gas must have collected inside of it. The feds say they will not have a report on the cause for several weeks due to the extensive debris that has to be cleared. Nine people were injured, none seriously. The eveining shift supervisor was locking the door after the last employee left when the explosion occurred. If it had happened twenty minutes earlier a lot of people would have been killed. That raises my eyebrows a little. The timing seems like something an arsonist who didn't necessarily want to kill anybody would have planned.

[H-townbenzoboy]

I felt the explosion, all the way over in Third Ward, which is roughly 15 miles away from the chemical plant. I heard that some people as far away was Dayton felt it was well. Dayton is about 40 miles NE of the plant.
-Joe

[KirkVining]

We heard it in Clear Lake - I bet that is a good thirty miles off - and we also had a lot of the smoke drift this way. You could see the mushroom cloud from here - it looked like someone had nuked the Galleria. It was reported people in League City heard it as well, which is a good forty miles away. I bet the guy locking the doors at the plant needed a clean pair of pants after that baby went off.

woo eee! Texas City revisited! I worked construction in the refinery jungle in Houston in the late 70's, it was quite a jungle there.

[KirkVining]

I usually take my yankee guests to Texas City, because it is one of those things you will remember your whole life, like seeing the Grand Canyon. It is absolutely like landing on another planet. Towering jumbles of spagetti pipes that go on for city block after city block. The worst refinery disaster occured there in the forties when a ship loaded with ammonia nitrate caught fire. The fire department was at the ship fighting a diesel fuel fire. Unbeknownst to them the diesel fuel was also leaking on the ammonia nitrate in the cargo hold, the combination of which creates TNT. The resulting explosion killed most of the fire department and leveled an elementary school, killing most of the kids inside. The fire burned for days, burning down most of Texas City in the process. We really know how to throw a good disaster around here.

Originally Posted by KirkVining

I usually take my yankee guests to Texas City, because it is one of those things you will remember your whole life, like seeing the Grand Canyon. It is absolutely like landing on another planet. Towering jumbles of spagetti pipes that go on for city block after city block. The worst refinery disaster occured there in the forties when a ship loaded with ammonia nitrate caught fire. The fire department was at the ship fighting a diesel fuel fire. Unbeknownst to them the diesel fuel was also leaking on the ammonia nitrate in the cargo hold, the combination of which creates TNT. The resulting explosion killed most of the fire department and leveled an elementary school, killing most of the kids inside. The fire burned for days, burning down most of Texas City in the process. We really know how to throw a good disaster around here.

ammonia nitrate makes a hell of an explosive: just ask the folks in the Murrow Federal Building in OKC.

[KirkVining]

A true monument to human error. They used a tanker to ship bulk quantity of diesel fuel and ammonia nitrate on the same boat, in order to save the cost of shipping it on two boats. The tanker had two 20,000 bbl tanks filled with diesel fuel, and tons of nitrate in 50lb paper sacks stacked up in the space between the tanks, one of which sprung a leak, soaking the nitrate for hours. You could not have built a better bomb on purpose.