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Huge Explosion at Texas Fertilizer Plant
A massive explosion took place around 8:50pm ET at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas. The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but the plant was on fire beforehand. The casualty reports are tentative and expected to rise, but two people are dead and over 150 are injured. Firefighters responding to the initial fire are unaccounted for. Over a thousand residents have been evacuated from their homes. Officials are worried about the volatility of another tank at the plant, but also about the potential damage from exposure to anhydrous ammonia. The blast was heard in Dallas, 75 miles away. "There are lots of houses that are leveled within a two-block radius. A lot of other homes are damaged as well outside that radius." A brief YouTube video shows the explosion of the plant.
Has anyone noticed that tomorrow (on April 19th) there will be 20 year since deadly siege at Waco, TX?
Fertilizer plants are dangerous places. I am surprised that in such a sparsely populated part of Texas the plant wasn't further away from houses.
It was detected by seismic networks. Note that the most common reason for "earthquakes" at zero depth is a quarry explosion, so that's how they initially labeled it. They've since changed it to read simply "Explosion". Click the "did you feel it link" and you can see that some people felt it as if it were an earthquake. Strangely, they are north of the event. Either the waves propogated that way, or people south of the event saw the cloud and realized it was an explosion not a quake.
I noticed that every time there's an explosion somewhere, /. has to have an article about it but yet it has nothing to do with tech. Can someone care to elaborate on why that is? More importantly, why does it just take a few hours for /. to have these kinds of news posts but yet tech related articles could be weeks behind?
I'm not reading here for the news (that is everywhere) either - I'm reading /. for the moderated comments that are certainly not everywhere.. (except yours)
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
or is it related to the Boston bomb attack..?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
if its not nuclear or terrorist nobody cares.
That video is impressive. Watch the video, show it to your kids, and tell them to bear it in mind next time you see someone successfully outrunning an explosion in a Hollywood film.
(except yours)
I can see it now, in the CNN comments section: "wtf, what's up with all of these non-tech stories on slashdot"
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
That was one big freakin explosion. The cameraman must have been at least a couple of hundred meters away and flaming debris was zipping past him almost instantly. Still it's a fertiliser plant, explosive by its very nature, no reason to think there's any connection between this and Boston. Yet.
Not quite on the same scale and completely lost in the news of this explosion there was a fire at Exxon in Beaumont with 12 people injured. Not a good day for Texas industry.
Interesting that just the other day we were discussing here about "exploitation" of social media sites etc. to drive traffic to "tech" sites after the Boston bombs. /;ers I already get my "mainstream" news from the BBC etc. Do we need this?
Here we have links to BBC, CNN & even Youtube?
I assume like many
Fertilizers are extremely dangerous and should be handled with more care. A similar thing happened in my town 12 years ago. If was on 21/9/2001, so 10 days after 11/9/2001 and therefore nobody heard about it but it left some 30 people dead and a city in ruins. Look up AZF in Toulouse on the web to see what I'm talking about. They first blamed it on the terrorists and later admitted it was an industrial accident. Like in Texas, the AZF factory was build out of the town but the town grown and it found itself in the middle of it. Poor urban planning.
This explosion appears very similar to that of the AZF chemical plant near Toulouse in France, though (thankfully) smaller in damage and victims.
Fire and ammonium nitrate deposits... like match and dynamite.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
Bomb in boston.. Kills a couple ppl. Injures a bunch.
Country loses its fucking mind and we'll get some new 'security' laws in place etc...
Industrial explosion kills 100+ from the last i was reading.
And not one single thing will change. At all. No more industrial controls than we have now. The last time this company got fined for safety violations they paid $3,000. Nothing really.
I don't get it... If we really have a problem with the whole 'people dying' thing.. Why don't we spend some money on the things that kill the most people..
But no... We go all nuts over some gun deaths or a bombing.. Ignore the stuff mostly that kills way more.
When on the larger scale of things... At it's worst only 20,000 a year died from guns back in the 90's... It's gone WAY down since then.
And yet every year... ~40,000 people will die from aspirin overdose...
40k is alot more than 20k... Have we ever seen one bit of info or warnings about aspirin? Nope.
Drunk drivers kill ~10,000 people a year...
Hell, ~30,000 people a year die on the roads... Have we worked very hard to fix that yet?
I just don't get it... Our sense of scale is completely fucked up.
We spend TRILLIONS and take away peoples rights because 'terrorisim'. And yet in a single year more people die from aspirin than have EVER died from terrorisim in the usa....
It makes no sense.
every Explosion seems to be IT News.
Possible comment from CNN.com: "WTF is it with all these tech related stories. CNN has completely gone down the shitter since Ted handed the reigns over. Fucking rounded corners, who gives a fuck when fertilizer plants are exploding and ricin is sent to US pols and we're supposed to give a fuck about Whobuntu or whatever the fuck. Fuck."
Here, listing 24 previous disasters, the largest of which was also in Texas. You'd think they, of all places, would know to keep large quantities of ammonium nitrate away from population centers (or vice versa).
Scarily, some of those disasters were from when a large quantity of ammonium nitrate powder had solidified and people tried to break it up with explosives.
The news reports I'm seeing don't actually say it was an ammonium nitrate explosion in this case, although it seems a reasonable supposition.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Me neither, but this one is about an explosion.
I'm kind of surprised this one hasn't been blamed on muslims as well.
this event was about mismanaging a facility (most likely), so there is a technical angle. :)
also, openstreetmap volunteers are mapping that region already - give a hand
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=31.80806&lon=-97.09316&zoom=16&layers=M
Rich
Quite often when you see something, even something not particularly dangerous but more annoying like an airport, that is in a populated area and say "Why the hell didn't they build it out in the middle of nowhere?" the answer is often that they did. When they built it, there was nothing around, but things grew up around it, or grew nearer and nearer to it.
You watch an area over a couple decades and it can go from "a whole lot of nothing" to "very developed".
I get this type of news from the mainstream outlets already.
Up to 25 cents of damage may have been caused!
(except yours)
I can see it now, in the CNN comments section: "wtf, what's up with all of these non-tech stories on slashdot"
And the conversation might evolve something like this:
CNN Commenter A: "Wtf, what's up with all of these non-tech stories on slashdot"
CNN Commenter B: "Wtf, is Slashdot?"
CNN Commenter A: "It's a gossip forum where cellar-dwelling nerds go to whine about things when they get tired of adding to the summit of 'Tissue Mountain'."
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Isn't the real news that it was one located OUTSIDE Washington, D.C.?
A fertilizer plant is being built in my little burg right now.
In the middle of one of the poorest and not exactly lilly white neighborhoods, of course.
can we finally say "that shit has hit the fan" in Texas ?
People will never agree about what constitutes news for nerds, but the following should be pretty much common ground:
* Things that go beep.
* Things that go boom.
It was detected by seismic networks. Note that the most common reason for "earthquakes" at zero depth is a quarry explosion, so that's how they initially labeled it. They've since changed it to read simply "Explosion". Click the "did you feel it link" and you can see that some people felt it as if it were an earthquake. Strangely, they are north of the event. Either the waves propogated that way, or people south of the event saw the cloud and realized it was an explosion not a quake.
Here is how it looked dangerously close (warning, the people taking this video were way too close so if you can't stomach listening to young girl in complete fear, don't watch that video all the way through) I'm guessing and hoping those people are okay being that the video is on YouTube.
My work here is dung.
Scarily, some of those disasters were from when a large quantity of ammonium nitrate powder had solidified and people tried to break it up with explosives.
WHAT??!! Isn't it a bit like "DUH I OVERFILLED THE TANK AGAIN - I'LL JUST BURN OFF A BIT WITH A MATCH" ?
This post contains no rudeness or derision of any kind. All arguments are friendly. Terms and exclusions may apply.
I live in Texas, and while tragic and all that, why is this news in slashdot? Why is it news for nerds? Was a computer security issue that caused the explosion? If I want world news i go to CNN or huffington Post, when I come to slashdot is to read news for nerds, stuff that matters.
Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d encule de ta mere.
... there was some flame visible on the left edge of the image. I would not call this a reflection since the main fire (as seen in that video) had not exploded, yet. Some kind of trigger?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The problem with economic growth, is that something like a $500M fertilizer plant brings lots of jobs. The people that work those jobs don't like driving 30 miles each way to get to work, so the town that used to be at a safe distance from the half-billion dollar industrial site grows towards it. Then the thing blows up and everyone asks "Why wasn't it in the middle of nowhere?"
It probably was when it was built 20 years ago.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
As a liberal East Coast Elite, I whole hartedly approve of this senseless loss of life. All Texans are prejudiced and therefore have no human rights. A loss of life only means something if it happens on the East (the best) Coast.
Seriously though we do need to get a hand on this fertilizer situation. I propose that we ban the sale of matches, fertilizer, and hammers to all people living outside the state of NY. See people outside my great state are not truly human, and definately can not be trusted with anything potentially dangerous (to New Yorkers).
-
Granted, it COULD be an accident or a non-cyber insider attack.
If it was not, would there be any evidence left? Could someone out there start looking?
Are we still checking the parts for cargo containers from N. Korea, which may be radioactive and/or ticking?
Or did we get distracted by the pressure cooker bomb?
Or were we distracted by the argument over whether they could put a nuke on a missile?
Fertilizer by itself doesn't tend to explode. If you have a nitrate-heavy fertilizer that's the oxygen source but if you want to make it explosive, you typically add carbon (charcoal or coal) and sulfur. I'm preeeeetty sure OSHA or whatever doesn't let those 2 be stored next to each other. So I'm really wondering how this would blow up. The last 2 major explosions I can think of were a propane storage facility and a rocket fuel manufacturing plant so those made sense. Fertilizer, not so much. They must have epically mixed up what was stored where or something.
My father in law was an insurance inspector for Lloyds.
He inspected ships carrying guano from Chile to Europe. Guano of course is what was used prior to the Haber process being commercialized.
The need for an inspector became pretty obvious after some of these ships disappeared en route. No warning. One day everything was fine, the next no contact.
The insurance company was more worried about the ships going up in port - much more liability.
The largest industrial accident in US history was a nitrate ship explosion killing 581 people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster
What you do is jigger the tables the insurance companies use so that "within Blast Zone of Industrial Building" is something they can charge a Rider for. Within a few years the problem will solve itself.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
"We need to stop apologizing for celebrating life."
"We need to stop apologizing for wanting to protect an individual's right to build a business."
It's not a toxin. Most vegetables contain ~ .1% fluoride normally. Also, dental caries are so much of a pandemic that people think it's normal to have them. This is wrong beyond description.
The idea of having tap water be free of "contaminants" is just delusional. It's not distilled or deionized, and it's not ever going to be. You're probably skipping some necessary trace minerals that way too.
Lastly, if you're going to label trace quantities of fluoride as "contaminants", be prepared to show that it is harmful. I can't guarantee a Nobel for that trick, but it will be a career-making discovery. I personally look forward to reading your paper.
There have been a lot of accusations against federal authorities performing inside false flag attacks. If anything like this or any of the shootings happen again, then all federal authorities need to be considdered suspects, and excluded from the investigation, and prevented from being on the site.
If anybody gets a chance to ask local government or local investigators, ask them why they continue to allow federal authorities to access the data and crime sceens.
Nobody is making money off of terrorism and mass murder (except perhaps "news" outlets and businesses selling unnecessary things to frightened people?) so we can't accept that, but if someone is in business, a few corpses are just the price of getting rich. Welcome to the plutocracy.
(Note to the sarcastically challenged: I agree with the anonymous parent poster's sentiments.)
WALSTIB!
The shit just hit the wall!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
> The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but *the plant was on fire beforehand.*
I'll bet it was a cruise missile.
If one were to remove first two and the last three letters from the first word in your nick, and last two and first three from the other, your nick would show that you are actually a "man g".
A G-MAN!
And when we jumble those letters around we get SHARIAH and the international symbol for frowning/sadness - TwT.
Ha! Your days as a government/Taliban double agent provocateur/griever are coming to their well deserved end!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Osama... Obama...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Here are some photos of the aftermath: http://galleries.apps.chicagotribune.com/chi-130418-fertilizer-plant-explosion-west-texas-pictures/
From what I've read of reports (caveat emptor), the fire started near an anhydrous ammonia tank. OK, bad, but from early reports it seems to have been worse.
Reportedly, there was a rail-car tanker full of fuming nitric acid nearby. A clear safety violation, but anyways...
Anhydrous ammonia is a strong base. It also, like any water-soluble chemical, has a certain heat of solution, in this case generating heat. So, spraying water on a fire that involves leaking anhydrous ammonia will generate more heat. Not good, but it gets worse. Apparently, from preliminary reports, there was a rail-car tanker full of fuming nitric acid nearby. That is a no-no, because fuming nitric is a strong acid. Aside from the heat of solution, strong acids react strongly with strong bases, often generating lost of heat, and gaseous byproducts such as hydrogen gas. And, oh, furthermore, fuming nitric acid is also a strong oxidizer.
To sum up this early-reported scenario, which may or may not be the full story: Anhydrous ammonia (NH3) was stored in close proximity with fuming nitric acid (HNO3). There was a fire of some sort. First-responders sprayed water onto this fire. What may have happened next was that the fire got the ammonia hot enough to possibly dissociate and produce H2, or perhaps the vessel just leaked. The heat of the fire eventually ruptured the nearby tanker car of fuming nitric acid, thus releasing it. Aside from the heat of solution, the ammonia and nitric acid could have come into contact. Strong base + strong acid = heat, hydrogen gas, and unhappy things. Add to that the strong oxidizing capability of fuming nitric acid, and you have: fuel + oxidizer + heat = BOOM.
That's just one possible chemical scenario that could have led to this tragedy.
The plant should have had very firm procedures for dealing with fires, separating reactive pairs of chemicals, and for dealing with leaks of the various chemicals that they stored in large containers. It seems, from these early reports, that they did not.
So many competing interests! Tiiiime to chooooose...
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Saudi national near the plant? Then they probably should take him for interrogation.
There's a thing called urban planning which helps you avoid that.
I'm speechless.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
behind on a paper today.
You're clearly not wasting enough time on Slashdot for something like that. You're barely in the "dishes need washing" category.
Wasting time on Slashdot instead of pursuing academic achievements requires a proper argument with several participants, neither side willing to yield or compromise.
With lengthy explanations and quotes and links to external sources.
Anyone can merely wait until the time runs out.
On Slashdot we weave our precious time and intellectual resources into elaborate sculptures of words which we then proudly present to the entire world.
"See this? THIS is what I actually did when I was supposed to be doing that other thing! Behold its terrible glory!"
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Next, on Mythbusters...
:3
And suggest that the explosion was likely caused by this aforementioned fire.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There is no rich bastard here to blame. There is one old guy who has lived there all his life and happens to own one of the businesses in town. It's not a giant mega-corporation here, it's simply a family business and an industrial accident. EPA profile of the site in question:
http://iaspub.epa.gov/enviro/fii_query_detail.disp_program_facility?p_registry_id=110038267452
Except that most "urban planners" are too busy spending money to try and get people out of their cars, instead of actually planning anything urban.
Streetcars and bioswales don't prevent this.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.