Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: RocketMan on April 07, 2020, 02:45:51 PM
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This happened about 450 yards from my property. (https://www.wbtv.com/2020/04/07/homes-damaged-explosion-fuel-facility-catawba-county/)
Fortunately no damage that we've been able to find to our house, but my next door neighbor had two windows blown out and a sliding glass door knocked from its track. The Longview fire marshal is supposed to be coming out to inspect his house.
The explosion was loud enough that it almost shook me out of bed. My first instant thought was our house had been struck by lightning, but the weather was clear. Then I thought a plane had crashed in our yard (we are under the base leg of one of the Hickory airport runways). Looking out our windows quickly disproved that notion.
Neighbors were swarming outside, trying to figure out what had happened.
Quite the start to my day.
There were no serious injuries at the plant where this occurred, which is fortunate indeed as there were 44 persons employed there.
Here are a couple of other links to stories.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/oneh2-hickory-plant-explosion-investigation/275-cddcf5ff-e872-4536-bc97-1c0919e101fc (https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/local/oneh2-hickory-plant-explosion-investigation/275-cddcf5ff-e872-4536-bc97-1c0919e101fc)
http://www.whky.com/archive/item/30053-several-agencies-respond-to-morning-explosion-at-long-view-plant (http://www.whky.com/archive/item/30053-several-agencies-respond-to-morning-explosion-at-long-view-plant)
ETA:
My sister-in-law heard the explosion in Hudson, sixteen miles away as the crow flies.
One of our fellow church members who also lives in Hudson called to ask if we were okay. They heard the explosion, as well. Her husband thought someone had kicked in their basement door and went searching for the bad guy.
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So much for trying to sleep in.
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Yikes!
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Well, your screen name fits the circumstance. :P =D
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(https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/001/360/1362599_02bcdea730.jpg)
bob
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This stuff is too dangerous, we need to move onto hydro2ndgen.
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Wow. I was trying to figure out what sort of equipment they have onsite from the video. All I see for sure is hydrogen tube trailers. There is some sort of system there next to it, but I am not sure what it is. I know they make very small steam methane reformers, but I am pretty sure they are bigger than that. All I can figure is that something leaked.....a lot. Some of those operations can be low budget and don't keep up with their flammable gas detection. Could be leaks got worse than "normal" and no one noticed.
The shap of the OneH2 logo looks familiar. I am curious if they are owned by a larger company.
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This stuff is too dangerous, we need to move onto hydro2ndgen.
Hydrogen fuel will save us from global warming.
I know engineers who have worked on hydrogen fuel station designs. Takes idiot proofing to a whole new level from what I hear.
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I wonder how many people set themselves, others, or property on fire during the early days of curbside gas pumps.
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If I remember correctly, hydrogen has a HUGE explosive range...
The only one I can think of that will explode in richer concentrations is acetylene...
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I wonder how many people set themselves, others, or property on fire during the early days of curbside gas pumps.
In the early days gasoline tended to have a lot of dissolved propane in it that would out gas, so I'm betting, more than a few.
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Hydrogen fuel will save us from global warming.
I know engineers who have worked on hydrogen fuel station designs. Takes idiot proofing to a whole new level from what I hear.
As soon as you idiot proof something they go right out and make a bigger idiot.
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So much for trying to sleep in.
Exactly what I was trying to do in enjoying my new retirement status.
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I was captain of an emergency response team at a GaAs foundry in Colorado Springs many years ago. We used hydrogen gas torches for all of our quartz work, making ampules and such for GaAs compounding and crystal growth. The hydrogen was piped through a good part of the plant to reach the glass working room. I had a fancy gas detector to find H2 leaks, but never had much of a problem with them as most of the pipe joints were welded IIRC. Hydrogen is such a small molecule, it would not have taken much of a flaw in a pipe fitting to cause a big leak.
It still gave me the willies at times, knowing what kind of energies could be let loose if something went wrong.
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I worked for a company that used high pressure hydrogen to load optical fibers before using a laser to write Bragg gratings in the cores. We referred to the high pressure chambers as "Hydrogen Bombs."
The safety people didn't like the "bomb" nickname very much.
Then we tried deuterium loading . . .
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If I remember correctly, hydrogen has a HUGE explosive range...
The only one I can think of that will explode in richer concentrations is acetylene...
I didn't find out about it right away, but Son1 used to generate H2 by water plus Drano in a coke bottle. (Drano, NaOH, used to have aluminum chips in it to make agitating bubbles.) He'd inflate a balloon by putting it on the neck of the bottle, then take it off and put a match to the balloon. That made a big enough bang that I heard them on one of our outdoor breaks where I worked, about a half mile away.
Wie Vater, wie Sonne. I hadda laugh about it when I found out.
Terry, using Scotch tape to seal my envelopes nowadays, 230RN
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At work, we make hydrogen, or at least we purify off gases from nearby chemical plants. Hydrogen is pretty safe as long as you don't let it leak or let oxygen mix with in the process (safer than other stuff I have been around). We have O2 analyzers on the incoming gas as well as the tail end. Everyone is also required to wear gas monitors in the plant. H2 always sets off the CO detector long before it triggers LEL (lower explosive limit) alarm. We have enough methane and hydrogen on site that we are covered by OSHA Process Safety Management and a lot of regulations to comply with. This site in NC is pretty small.
IMO, the most dangerous thing is allowing H2 to leak and get trapped in an enclosed area where it can concentrate. At least, that is the primary cause of the most serious safety events I have heard of. I am kind of wondering if they had a pipe or tube let loose dumping a bunch of H2 all at once that ignited like a small fuel air bomb. Those tube trailers in the video hold quite a bit of H2 at 3000 psi or so.
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The explosion occurred inside the building, blowing out at least one wall and up through the roof from what I have been able to gather.
I wonder if there was a leak in the building, with the hydrogen rising and collecting in a ceiling space. Source of ignition, then boom!
It was an incredibly loud bang, even at almost 500 yards distance. It was easily louder than 155mm HE round detonations I heard in the service.
We could hear a loud hissing sound from escaping gas for some minutes after the explosion. Don't know if that was compressed hydrogen coming from damaged pipes or tanks, or perhaps natural gas feed stock from a ruptured line. We did not notice any mercaptan smell, and the wind was blowing the right direction to have brought it to us, so it probably wasn't natural gas.
Found out that the hardware store at the bottom of the hill, at .63 miles from the blast site, had one of their front display windows blown in. I went there to have a lawn mower tire repaired and they were cleaning up the glass and installing a plywood patch over the window.
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I gotta chuckle at that reporter's name: Steve Ohnesorge. Steve "Without care, worry."
I'm still not clear on whether this was a pressure vessel rupture or a real combustion explosion.
From the energy involved, it could be either a real big pressure vessel, or a real big H2 - O2 mix.
Neither of which leaves much explosive residue to analyze.
Or is that still up in the air?
Terry, 230RN
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I gotta chuckle at that reporter's name: Steve Ohnesorge. Steve "Without care, worry."
I'm still not clear on whether this was a pressure vessel rupture or a real combustion explosion.
From the energy involved, it could be either a real big pressure vessel, or a real big H2 - O2 mix.
Neither of which leaves much explosive residue to analyze.
Or is that still up in the air?
Terry, 230RN
I'm not sure what it was, Terry, H2 pressure vessel bursting or gas combustion of some sort. It was one helluva boom is all I can tell you.
The shock wave was strong enough to cause damage at least 2/3rds of a mile away, something I confirmed personally.
I've been darn close to lightning strikes before ('frinstance, took a strike to an antenna on my house one July 4th when I lived in COS) where I thought the instantaneous thunder was loud, but this explosion was much louder, even at a quarter mile away.
Standing in the bedroom after the boom, there were a few seconds when I thought a plane had crashed in my yard. (I have a 2/3rd acre lot close to the airport.)
When I was one of Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, I got to hear arty and other ordinance explosions on the range now and again. There was one time in Hawaii when I was volunteered as a radio operator for an EOD team. We blew up a big pile of dud ordinance on the range one day, and it made a heck of a boom. As I recall, it wasn't quite as loud as what happened at the hydrogen plant, and we were a similar distance away when it went bang. It did make a real nice mushroom cloud and tossed a bit of shrapnel our way, making things a bit sporty for a few seconds.
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Thanks, I thought I was just missing something in the thread. So we wait and see.
Judging from Son1's experiments with H2 filled balloons, it can make some pretty good sharp-edged shock waves. (I heard them about 1/4 mile away.)
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My neighbor immediately behind my house and a couple hundred feet closer to the hydrogen fuel plant told me something interesting. He was working outside when the event occurred. He reported hearing a popping sound just seconds before the earth shattering kaboom. Makes me wonder if there wasn't a quick release of a substantial amount of hydrogen that found an ignition source a few seconds later.
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My neighbor immediately behind my house and a couple hundred feet closer to the hydrogen fuel plant told me something interesting. He was working outside when the event occurred. He reported hearing a popping sound just seconds before the earth shattering kaboom. Makes me wonder if there wasn't a quick release of a substantial amount of hydrogen that found an ignition source a few seconds later.
That's interesting... Basically an unintentional FAE bomb...
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That's interesting... Basically an unintentional FAE bomb...
That's a good possibility.
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If a pipe or tube around one of those high pressure tube trailers let go, that could dump a lot of hydrogen into the air in a very short time. If it was partially trapped in the building, that could focus the concussion toward that one lady's house. I was trying to figure out if this was a slow leak in the building that ignited when people arrived in the morning and turned on lights or if it was a rupture or heavy leak. I don't know. I am leaning toward sudden leak as I think the building would suffer more damage if it was all inside.
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I reckon we're still in the learning phase of how to handle hydrogen.
Thank G-d nobody was killed.
But I can't help thinking about boiler explosions before we learned how to play with steam.
In fact, I guess we're still learning. Three killed:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/killed-boiler-explosion-caught-camera-46562554
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In the early days of stationary building steam heating systems there was the mistaken idea that you needed high pressure to heat a home or other building, and there were a number of nasty explosions, and for about 50 years steam heat fell out of favor, especially in Europe.
Someone finally realized that home systems worked perfectly well at ounces of pressure, not pounds, meaning you essentially had a tea kettle in your basement, not a pressure vessel bomb.
Steam systems were accepted more readily in the US, especially starting after the Civil War, likely because all of the major kinks had been worked out of the systems.
The house I grew up in had been fitted with steam heat some years after it was built.
It never went boom once.
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I reckon we're still in the learning phase of how to handle hydrogen.
Thank G-d nobody was killed.
But I can't help thinking about boiler explosions before we learned how to play with steam.
In fact, I guess we're still learning. Three killed:
https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/killed-boiler-explosion-caught-camera-46562554
If I remember right, the deceased had just been hired at an adjacent business, and were all in the same room together, filling out new hire paperwork.
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Just read one news article that said the event was indeed a hydrogen explosion, but there is still no information available as to the cause.