Wanna see what a gas explosion does to a house??

[P95Carry]

I think this was a fire department test but heck - goes to show what a gas explosion can do - several views of this massive (and devastating) kaboom!!!

House Blows up

[grampster]

Probably why swmbo requires me to take massive quantities of Beano at various and sundry times.

[K Frame]

We had that happen here in Northern Virginia a few years ago.

A house just blew up in the middle of the afternoon in the middle of a wealthy enclave in McLean.

Family was in Europe for two weeks, and no one knew how to get in touch with them. The first idea they had that there were problems was when they got out of the taxi and all that was left was a foundation hole.

[P95Carry]

What a nasty thing to return back to Mike - pretty much as bad as a fire.  Goes to show - leave contact info with friends when away!!

Gramp's - steady on the Beano LOL!  You can have too much of a good thing

[K Frame]

The amazing thing about that one is that there were no deaths, no injuries, and very little extraneous property damage. Unlike a lot of Northern Virginia, these were somewhat older homes and were quite a bit farther apart than the standard these days, which seems to be drop 10 4,000 square foot houses on an acre lot and charge a million each for them.

IIRC cause was traced to a water heater failure. The gas accumulated, and something else in the house set it off.

[atek3]

that was serious... how many pounds of TNT equivalent do you think that blast was?

atek3

[P95Carry]

Hard to equate to TNT - because the gas probably permeated much of the structure before ignition.  So - once the flame front had propogated (real quick) the explosive forces were very distributed and so impacted almost the entire stucture.  

The gas explosion is relatively ''soft'' compared with the brissance of TNT where shock and hi-vel' detonation speed is the key - shock-wave/pressure front doing rapid damage.  I'd have to make a very ball park guess as to equivalent - we need an EOD type guy here to get good figures.  I'm thinking around 10# could well be pretty effective but maybe not quite in the ''blowing the roof of'' sense .