By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...
A contractor showed me how to fix dents in granite with superglue. It’s totally clear. The trick is to scrape it with a razor blade at a 90 degree angle (strait horizontal). The imperfections become nearly invisible.
I expect something with a lot of small bubbles and cracks, also it also overheated and got weird decomposition and reactions, something like a overcooked/toasted meal. Reusing a comment that I made in a previous thread:
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack?
Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.
Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).
Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).
Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.
> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.
They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.
Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.
A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.
If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.
The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.
> The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,
The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?
Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.
By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...
> By the miraculous grace of God
Guess He was asleep on the job when the valve broke causing the situation in the first place, but good on Him for intervening later.
BLEVE = Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion
When this is all over, when they peel the metal tank away, will they have a gigantic clear block of material?
Ooh, like when a bottle of Krazy Glue dries out? I kinda hope so...
Had to look that up. Pretty cool. Would've expected it to be more cloudy. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1ogb2k3/m...
A contractor showed me how to fix dents in granite with superglue. It’s totally clear. The trick is to scrape it with a razor blade at a 90 degree angle (strait horizontal). The imperfections become nearly invisible.
I expect something with a lot of small bubbles and cracks, also it also overheated and got weird decomposition and reactions, something like a overcooked/toasted meal. Reusing a comment that I made in a previous thread:
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack?
Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.
The spark could have caused an explosion.
Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).
Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).
Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.
I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.
> Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?
Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.
They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.
Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."
Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.
A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.
If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.
The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.
> The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,
The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?
Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.
What the...?!
I was literally just this afternoon telling someone about TIWWW and posting them some favourites.