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All you engineering disaster buffs read this

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:21pm
by Dennis Toy
This contains a video of a 1988 explosion at a chemical plant near Las Vegas. The video of it is here.

http://www.exponent.com/multimedia/cases/hend.html

Who wants to bet that this was safer than Star trek Warp cores :P

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:32pm
by Hyperion
i would NOT be surprised.

and it was probably harder to make happen then the wonderful ST exploding unfuzed consoles... :roll:

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:34pm
by Darth Wong
Star Trek engineers would have built a daycare in the place.

PS. explosive yield equivalent to roughly 0.7 kilotons. Hot damn!

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:45pm
by Dennis Toy
Watch the video and listen to how the shockwave delays hitting the microphone and rocking the camera..

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:50pm
by Sea Skimmer
IIRC, this was the site that produced fuel for NASA's shuttle program. When it shut down for a while after the Challenger blew up, no one told them to stop producing the fuel. So they kept producing it but not delivering and just stockpiled it on site. Then they had a fire.

Posted: 2002-12-08 11:56pm
by Drewcifer
IIRC, there was a man still at the plant when one of the blasts went off. Amazingly, he survived, albeit with ruptured ears drums and a few broken bones from being thrown 20-30 feet. That clip was on RealTV, one of those 'amazing videos from around the world' shows.

There's another amazing video like that of a gasoline tanker truck in Mexico that explodes in a fireball that was something like 20 stories tall. If I can find a link, I'll post it.

Posted: 2002-12-09 12:06am
by Crown
There is an old 60's - 70's clip somewhere on my hard drive, where a whale was beached and died. Civil planners wondered what they should do with it, and the decision was made to 'blow it up' hoping that it would totally vaporise the thing. Anyway they were wrong, they stacked as much dynamite as they thought neccessary, and then pulled the trigger. The result; whale meat rained down EVERYWHERE denting car roofs and knocking over by-standers, very amussing.

Posted: 2002-12-09 12:22am
by Sea Skimmer
Darth Wong wrote:Star Trek engineers would have built a daycare in the place.

PS. explosive yield equivalent to roughly 0.7 kilotons. Hot damn!
If it weren't for the smoke from the first explosion, you'd see a pretty clear mushroom cloud rising from the second blast. As it is you can make it out fairly well.

This is what a 1.2 kiloton burst buried at 67 feet looks like for comparision.

Image

Posted: 2002-12-09 03:30pm
by Admiral Valdemar
Big badda boom.

But nothing to that ammunition ship in Canada one day at the turn of the century...

Posted: 2002-12-09 03:45pm
by TrailerParkJawa
I remember seeing this on TV. Holy crap what an explosion. Its amazing to see the shock wave spread across the desert floor.

Posted: 2002-12-09 03:47pm
by Kuja
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!!!!! :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: :twisted: