> "I look forward to the eventual incident report for the root causes of this one - assuming that we do such things any more here in the #$%@! Golden Age in which we find ourselves - because that, too, will make things safer going forwards. One hopes."
If there's no after action report, we'll never get a good episode of Well There's Your Problem on this incident, and that would be a loss for both engineering and podcasting ;-(
Now I'm thinking that a weak part of the tank gave way at one of the lesser welds on this non-pressure vessel, quite early and in the top part of the tank well above the liquid level. When you stand on top of a big tank, a lot of them do flex quite a bit. Physical pressure must have increased somehow in a way that could not be relieved without rupture.
IIRC there was some report of a "gas leak" to begin with and that could very well have been it.
I can only imagine what it's like to be one of the shift operators down there on the pavement around the tanks and pipes on a daily basis, in their flame-retardant coveralls and hardhats. Based on my vivid experience working with similar operators as I took official samples from tanks usually located in much bigger tank farms.
MMA smells so sharp that any leakage from a valve or pipe fitting gets attention much more so than other flammable liquids, for instance things like paint removers, alcohol or acetone which smell very faint by comparison. I expect that the workers had gotten accustomed to a fairly clean air environment without serious toxicity levels, and would estimate that a leak of about 1 drop per minute from a flange would be easily identified and fixed. Not only to keep the neighbors from complaining, but to keep the workers from gagging when they walk closer to that location.
If the first sign of trouble was physical tank bulging and/or suddenly stinking up the whole place with lots of MMA vapor (like from an upper tank rupture) when there is no sign of leakage on the ground, that pretty much qualifies as a "gas leak". Once the smell was no longer prominent, I would say that polymerization was well underway and there was not as much free monomer available to build up more pressure or even evaporate very much after that. If there's warm liquid MMA open to the atmosphere, you will smell it downwind.
It might be a stretch to say that "nature takes its course" when synthetic monomers spontaneously polymerize like this, but that's what some of them do best that sets them apart.
From what I understand, in the uninhibited pure monomer it doesn't take that many PPM of monomer molecules to become "activated" in some way before the chain reaction of them with remaining molecules eventually accelerates to completion. Which may be why such a low concentration of inhibitor works so well, but inhibitor must be well-dispersed within the liquid and there must be enough circulation to avoid local depletion of the inhibitor due to stagnant contact with as yet unidentified unexpected initiators. Not only should it be easy to get a random 1 liter sample from a tank (of such non-viscous material) at any time, the single sample should ideally be highly representative of the entire tank contents. Due to the way the liquid is handled in bulk going in & out of the tank, as well as any additional circulation to insure good mixing of incoming cargo, or after boosting inhibitor amounts when only a few carefully measured pounds or kilos of the concentrated inhibitor is dumped into the bulk monomer to keep it from going below spec.
The inhibitors have been selected to be very strong and effective at what they do so it doesn't require a high concentration, and the downstream processors can more easily overcome the inhibitor effect and produce plastics using different and milder polymerization initiator techniques when there is not an excess of inhibitor.
Once it gets polymerizing past that minuscule little inhibitor, from that point it's like there is no inhibitor at all. So there is some possibility that this is a fairly worst-case runaway polymerization event where the full amount of caution was rightfully warranted. Even though it would have to be considered fairly benign compared to a whole tank of the liquid monomer dispersing through the neighborhoods, or going up in a fireball, which is always a risk anyway :\
Under storage, it really is tremendous force that the inhibitor is holding back, considering how badly outnumbered it is by the 99.9% of everything else in the tank that wants to spontaneously react with itself otherwise. When the inhibitor is only about 20 PPM, which in percent is 0.0020%, in these cases percent by weight. IOW 20 lbs of MEHQ crystals dissolved in every million lbs of MMA liquid, or in metric 20 kilos of inhibitor for every million kilos of cargo.
Now usually the lowest inhibitor concentration will be at the chemical plant that produces the monomers, and it may go into bulk storage the same way when fresh material is moving through the system adequately. From there, vessels, rail cars and trailers often have different amounts of additional inhibitor added in order to boost levels according to purchase agreements of the different industrial consumers.
Often by contractors such as companies I have worked for who store the inhibitor concentrate as agents for the client, and can sample industrial tanks & test in the lab to routinely determine inhibitor concentration. Then carefully measure according to requirements and be the third party that certifies the new concentration after our field operator physically adds the additional dose to the tank.
For something like vessels and rail cars you just can't expect their cargo samples to accurately reflect a recently boosted inhibitor value, the small amount of inhibitor concentrate won't be adequately mixed with the rest of the bulk monomer before the ship leaves the dock or the train leaves the terminal. So it has to be certified by careful physical addition while being supported by good lab data to begin with. You expect lab readings to match the certificate after the ship gets overseas or the rail car gets across the country.
Now measuring low PPM is not always easy but you get better after a while.
Much better for me because I got to start doing it my own way as soon as I could, after first establishing as many of the predecessor techniques as possible for reference, but people still wanted more reliable results and so did I since the beginning. Ever since then, doing the continuous improvement thing for more decades than you normally get.
(also waaaay down on the list of uses at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate) but I thought that first link was clearer. Look for "In semiconductor research and industry, PMMA aids as a resist in the electron beam lithography process.")
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.
It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.
> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.
Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:
I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.
Well then... make a matrix of such fuse-containers? (say every 20cm or whatever)
I guess manufacturing such a matrix would be pretty expensive though, you'd need to carefully automate its production I think. It would also definitely interfere with flow of fluid in the tank.
I was thinking multiple long skinny tubes with etchings that make them more likely to split lengthwise. Maybe with a spring loaded/powered agitator so when the tube breaks there's some mechanical flinging/mixing of the inner chemical.
But I'm not a chemical processes engineer, so I don't know how much mixing is needed. But the existing emergency plan was to inject the the chemical through a single valve, so it seems like the dispersion and mixing requirements in this case seems to be low.
I am imagining some sort of regulatory system that enforces appropriate safety systems are created and installed on all similar sites in the affected jurisdiction.
Ideally a standard that can prevent similar danger elsewhere in the world too.
Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.
Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.
> 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.
> 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."
That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.
I worked with someone whose father drove his whole family out of the killing zone in Bhopal on a two wheeler. There might not have been a strong international movement to enforce safety first behavior on transnationals, but there was fall out.
US government actions demonstrate the value placed on a life in another country can be much lower than the statistical value here in the US. We could save a life for a few thousand dollars with malaria nets (or so it's claimed); domestically a value of $12M per saved life is considered enough to justify some safety improvement.
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.
It depends a lot on context. That's certainly a reasonable approach in some situations. However in this instance it's not clear to me that there's any possible way to comply with modern regulations. My impression is that in general it isn't permitted to keep massive tanks of hazardous industrial chemicals 500 feet from residential housing units in the middle of the city.
I think this is an example where it might have been reasonable for the taxpayers to foot a bill to facilitate their relocation 20 or 30 years ago.
Take this into context with the outsourcing of all such work to China though. Environmental regulations are assessed to be one of the largest impacts US GDP. We take that hit to protect human life, and then by all the stuff from China that they make without those regulations. We minimize any risk of harm to our citizens at the cost of their jobs, while putting the citizens of China at risk instead. My only point is that there is no right answer. It is a judgement call about how much risk we think is acceptable in trade for what modern conveniences. If paying to move the plant would cost more than what it produces provides us, we should decide whether we do without, or just accept that sometimes industrial accidents kill a few hundred people.
> I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
It's par for the course of many US companies and likely others outside the US. I have been in a lot of manufacturing/industrial facilities and find a lot of machismo coupled with greedy asshole bosses/owners/managers. You wind up with corporate culture of "keep your head down, do as your told, don't question, and get paid."
It leads to a normalization of deviance where you end up with resentful workers who don't give a shit. Then when things go wrong, management can then easily blame them for their crappy work ethic and fire them. Then hire a new person to demoralize in exchange for money. It's a scam really.
The only way to curb that behavior is to hold people responsible but we seem to be incapable of doing that because the people who need to be held responsible have too much money and power.
That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
> Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Because the tank was there first and morons came later on and said they wanted to build housing, the land was cheap and no zoning was in place to prevent someone from building housing there.
is the one that gets me. Fried snacks from Asia frequently have a Prop 65 warning. Thing is it is produced by ordinary cooking techniques from ordinary and can be found in both traditional and ultra-processed foods.
Well, the “experts” say a charred steak is carcinogenic. At that point, I stopped listening to anything out of their mouths. It might be true, but it’s also a matter of degree.
California has set such a low threshold that one cannot take their label seriously about anything. It applies to nearly everything, making it effectively a useless warning.
It also never lists the specific substances nor what one can do about it (not enter the building, don’t lick the ceiling, wear a mask, whatever). Good intentioned but utterly useless.
> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.
Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
I'd agree that deregulation is a complete hard no for most people, but that's because removing bad/watered down regulation isn't enough. Calling for "deregulation" is like saying "defund the police". A very small number of radicals claim to actually want that, but most people think that something better has to fill the void. Bad regulation needs to be replaced by good regulation.
If what you mean by "Deregulation" is "different/better regulation" most people will happily support it. For example, most people would love to have the government just automatically mail them their tax refunds with the paperwork they need to verify it was correct. Standing in their way are companies who have been spending a lot of money on bribes to make sure filing our taxes is as expensive and difficult as possible (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...)
There was a pretty decent campaign locally to make it legal to deliver fixed line broadband services.
But once you convince someone that the legislation exists and the penalties exist for supplying fixed line broadband services, the next goal posts slide into place, and they reflexively defend the idea that the government would fine people more for overbuilding the national carrier to a greater extent than importing several kilos of cocaine. They parrot absolutely bonkers shit like "Internet is a natural monopoly" when they literally have to fine people to make it a monopoly.
Most people defend the status quo with extreme vigor. And most people aren't even slightly qualified to analyse the status quo. The supplied alternative doesnt matter. Some person they dont know, doing something they are ambivalent about might find their profession easier. Thats completely verboten.
Are you sure that the "Internet is a natural monopoly" people were actually people and not just bots and shills? The only reason I could see real people wanting a monopoly would be if they were pushing for the government to handle the infrastructure and then lease out access to whoever wants to offer services over the lines. There's a case that it doesn't make sense to have 50 different companies all running physical cables everywhere. What doesn't make sense is only allowing one private company to do it and leaving yourself at their mercy.
Agreed, although in addition to that the hope was to do other things too like divert funds out of tasks the police do that they shouldn't be doing in the first place (like mental health calls and wellness checks) and into social services/EMS instead and also away from internal affairs and into independent/community oversight boards (no more policing themselves).
I doubt any pithy slogan would have encompassed all of it, but the least they could have done was avoid something that most people would reject instantly for being insane. It's amazing that so many people managed to get past the slogan at all to get into the "well actually what we mean is..." and it was totally predictable that the slogan would be weaponized against the movement by opponents
Complaining about the Chevy Cruze like that is hilarious. Did you go out of your way to pick up a particularly harmless example?
What about all the other cars that kill significantly more people by design? Like, I don’t know, any SUV or pickup truck? In that context, picking on the rather innocent Cruze seems a bit obtuse.
I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.
AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.
Shouldn't any design that is killing people, no matter how petty you think it is, be reason for homicide investigation against the companies executives?
I guess if you viewed customers as actual people the 'the dow is 50k - why do you want us to stop war crimes?' might also get a response requiring the treatment of humans with dignity.
If your executives can't kill people to make a couple of million what's the point of even being a wage-slave./s
No, because some killing is necessary for the economy to function. Reduction to zero means elimination of the product.
The way this statistical background of economic death is handled is by assigning a finite value to a human life. In the US it's about $12M. If you think this is inhumane, consider that this is the cutoff for government actions for reducing deaths (from traffic accidents, disease, etc.) Actions where the cost per life saved are higher than this figure mean we're leaving on the table actions that could have saved more lives for the resources spent.
I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.
You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.
"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.
You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.
If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.
Exactly, the burden for better behavior lies with the people with the power, agency, and information.
The consumer is did not decide on the formulation of Chemical X, they weren't there to see the day it accidentally melted through the floor, and if the customer was somehow a hyper-motivated scientist with the right training, the company isn't gonna share the data.
You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.
Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.
I have read the rules are tighter in most EU nations.
There is jurisdiction shopping of course. If china or wherever wants to have really lax rules, and that means production moves there, I’m not sure what the answer is.
But, for this product (making plexiglass like things), I expect all the consumer production has gone overseas anyway. This is defense / aerospace, so it probably can’t move.
The answer is actually really easy, and it's been implemented successfully before: selective import taxes.
You set import taxes so that they offset price advantages. If a country has shitty environmental laws, crappy labor protections, etc. then you prices that into their import taxes. That way they don't gain any advantages in a race to the bottom based on things that you care about in your own country.
If a country adopts better environment laws, labor projections, etc. then you lower the import tariffs you charge on that country's relevant goods
They are not saying that we have to do everything here, they are saying: If you want to move your mfg. to a country that has less environmental regulation enforcement, labor law enforcement and other things that we care about here, then the goods you are shipping back should be tariffed accordingly.
If we as a people pass environmental laws & labor laws because we feel that these things are important then why are we accepting products that are made in violation of our standards.
Snark aside, the widespread lack of understanding of basic economic concepts is actually a real problem. On one side, you got an utter buffoon like Trump acting like taxes and tariffs are his personal revenge sledgehammer to wield however he wants, and on the other side you got (an awful lot of) short-term rewarders who will accept just about any predictable long-term consequence for short-term "lower prices for consumers".
Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.
You present this as if consumers were truthfully informed of all the ecological and labor impacts of products they buy. In many cases contrary is true, companies don't inform the customers, try to hide the impacts or downplay the impacts. Using outsourcing and very difficult to trace supply chains is often way to prevent informed public.
The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.
The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.
By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.
We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.
It may well be quite valid in context to let a company or even an entire industry go bankrupt if the net negative is large enough and give zero fucks if the mitigation required is practical or affordable. It may also be valid from the perspective of one group of citizens to foist the cost and risk on another nations less organized or represented citizens in another nation. Unkind but we don't pay our lawmakers to represent our citizens and theirs equally.
The average person is dumber than a box of rocks and the ones that aren't have limited time, attention, and expertise. They can't be relied on to make practical decisions while shopping on amazon regarding the practical effects of their buying power. The only hope to have sane decision making is by subject matter experts which is why we are a nation of laws which basically say follow the rules set down by these unlected assholes who actually know <insert subject> because it is literally the only practical way forward in our nation of 338M stupid assholes.
I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.
I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!
A couple weeks ago when they called me back to the lab the supervisor had one of the clear polymer disks on their desk that had formed in a pint sample bottle that was about half full.
The sample recycling operator came across the occasional one that had polymerized, over months of identical ambient storage to the other bottles in the case which could still be handled as liquids.
Broke it out of the bottle and brought it into the office, where it was completely odorless and sitting there like a promotional acrylic paperweight with nothing embedded inside to promote :)
If this tank has a giant disk of clear acrylic at the bottom, it "might" be unprecedented to remove it intact and turn it into a fairly sizable lens if possible. If not clear, maybe even a mirror of some kind anyway.
Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.
Water but it's a bit of hit and miss that can turn soggy, better is bicarbonate that triggers are more or less instant reaction (often in baking powder in a pinch, but that's mostly a waste compared to just bicarb).
Often if one wants to make something "larger", dropping superglue, adding bicarb with a silt, blowing away and dropping another layer works fairly well (it's a bit of a brittle but still quite hard mass that is created quickly).
I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk
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.
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've been told this is a cheap way to fix small windshield cracks. Never tried it but sounds like it would work for the small spider sized and shaped cracks from small rock impacts.
This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)
Being an armchair expert, I wondered if they couldn't have flown a quadcopter with a small drilling machine and drill a hole on the top to relive pressure?
First, there's probably a pressure relief system already on the tank.
The problem is that is analogous to drilling a hole in a pressure cooker, it's either going to rupture the tank entirely, or blast the contents into the air.
Also curious where you would get a "quadcopter with a small drilling machine" with a couple hours' notice; even if you had one, it would be hard to maintain a position at one exact spot, and much of the lift energy would be expended in the torque reaction of the drill.
I am seeing papers go by from Chinese researchers who are interested in things like using drones to do maintenance on sea platforms and they'd definitely be interested in attaching drills to drones and the like.
It seems like the issue wasn't the pressure so much, but the temperature. The contents were supposed to be stored at 50 degrees. The thermometer for the tank was reading 100 degrees, but nobody knew what the actual temperature was, because the thermometer's maximum reading was 100. So the challenge was to figure out how to cool things down (which would relieve the pressure in turn)
All process tanks I've seen have various cleanout hatches, drain valves, pressure relief blowoff valves... even your water heater has these. Not sure about this tank in particular and obviously there were no easy answers in this particular event, but hopefully lessons will be learned.
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.
If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas.
Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds break which then passes the stress on to the material straight after that. This all happens very quickly and can even accelerate as the hole grows bigger and gas starts moving.
It’s very lucky that the crack that formed didn’t propagate like that. It could be for many reasons though, like the crack front could have run into thicker material or a weld line or something like that and if luckily stopped the crack.
Cracks in pressure vessels can propagate faster then the speed of sound. Which means your pressure vessel goes to flinders before any pressure is relieved.
Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.
• ELIMINATE all ignition sources (no smoking, flares, sparks or flames) from immediate area.
• All equipment used when handling the product must be grounded.
• Do not touch or walk through spilled material.
• Stop leak if you can do it without risk.
• Prevent entry into waterways, sewers, basements or confined areas.
• A vapor-suppressing foam may be used to reduce vapors.
• Absorb or cover with dry earth, sand or other non-combustible material and transfer to containers.
• Use clean, non-sparking tools to collect absorbed material.
Large Spill
• Dike far ahead of liquid spill for later disposal.
• Water spray may reduce vapor, but may not prevent ignition in closed spaces.
I read that was the primary concern and wondered about drilling/piercing techniques that could avoid a spark. Spraying water sounds like the dumbest one but some kind of mud applied or something. CNC machines don’t seem to be light shows but i know very little.
I guess that begs the next point though - the high pressure system inside would want to violently vent out to the low pressure system outside through the relatively tiny hole.
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...
Slavery is not OK. Someone indentured for owing a debt can be compelled for a maximum of six years and goes free in the seventh, with no payment required from him.
It's ok to just treat it like a thing people say. When people say 'bless you' I don't explain to them that sneezing doesn't actually expel my soul from my body.
My parents are retired fire-fighters. They had an American pygmy goat named Bleve. Those goats commonly have very rotund stomachs[1] that look like they are about to explode.
A BLEVE does not need oxygen to become an explosion. The explosion occurs with the rupture of a tank (that has been heated, increasing the internal pressure and thus increasing the boiling point of the liquid inside, so that it remains liquid). This causes a loss of rapid loss of pressure, which in turn rapidly decreases the boiling point of the liquid, thus causing a sizable part of the liquid to almost immediately boil and cause an expanding "cloud" of gas.
When this occurs, you have an explosion that can propel parts of a steel propane tank up to 1/2 mile (at least).
It doesn't need it but it makes it that much more destructive. Your propane example is such a case - as the hot cloud expands explosively it burns on contact with new oxygen and the heat serves to further perpetuate the process. An overheated tank of propane provides an illustration of the principle on which thermobaric warheads are based.
Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates:
This agency is the subject of a budget war between the current executive and Congress, with the former trying to cut its budget and the Congress just restoring its budget, so not sure if it will be doing a report on Garden Grove:
> 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.
On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.
I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.
It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).
So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.
It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).
In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)
In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.
> In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe.
This is common. Isocyanates are a common example — isocyanate monomers are nasty, and the very light ones are very nasty. They’re used to make polyurethane, polyurea and such, which are quite nontoxic in polymerized form.
In applications where the unreacted isocyanates are used by anyone other than professionals (e.g. two component varnishes), the manufacturer may go out of their way to use more expensive but less toxic variants.
Correct, PMMA is completely harmless. MMA is an incredibly common adhesive, and is in probably a dozen things in the room you are sitting in in its polymerized form.
The overall point remains the same: the toxicity, both short and long term, of MMA, is comparable to lots of everyday substances that are both commonly eaten and inhaled.
It just isn't that toxic as far as chemicals go. That doesn't mean it would be like great for you but calling it "highly toxic" is tremendously overblown and doesnt serve anyone well to claim.
Let's save the highly toxic claim for things that actually deserve it. We don't have to sensationalize everything. I maintain my view that the explosion would likely be much much worse than the odds of significant respiratory damage from MMA.
Also note the sensationalization also causes placebo effect. People miles away started claiming "their lungs hurt" when
1. There was no leak
2. Even if their was and it was a conspiracy or whatever, your lungs have ~no pain receptors and your chest/pleura/etc would generally not hurt from MMA overexposure. Your throat would and your skin would, depending on concentration.
But nobody complained about skin irritation when the is basically no way to end up with one without the other.
Etc.
Sensationalization of this hurt people so far more than the actual issue!
Got a source for that? I searched a bit and found so evidence that its combustion products are notably hazardous. I did find an SDS stating that MMA’s combustion products do not have special hazards.
What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation. If we ever get hit by an earthquake or other larger disaster, it's safe to assume we're all on our own.
Also, as someone affected by this, it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
> it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
It is amazing how the modern world has a webpage for every organisation but they can't bloody update it usefully and use a random platform (Xitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, facebook) instead.
Tangent but there's a great Sublime song titled `Garden Grove`. Looks like they made a modern video for it that presumably shows a lot of Garden Grove. Or it could be Long Beach, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSo_zj0UQw
> "I look forward to the eventual incident report for the root causes of this one - assuming that we do such things any more here in the #$%@! Golden Age in which we find ourselves - because that, too, will make things safer going forwards. One hopes."
If there's no after action report, we'll never get a good episode of Well There's Your Problem on this incident, and that would be a loss for both engineering and podcasting ;-(
Given the disruption this has caused in Orange County I would expect to eventually get a slick US Chemical Safety Board video on it.
I had to go look-- I thought the CSB got defunded and closed. Luckily it appears it did not (though not for lack of trying).
John Childgey's "Causality" podcast[0] covers stuff like this, and I'm sure he'll eventually cover it.
[0] https://engineered.network/causality/
Here's a fascinating postmortem analysis of two similar incidents, Styrene and Butyl Acrylate:
https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...
From fuzzfactor's comment with lots of other great info:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245
Now I'm thinking that a weak part of the tank gave way at one of the lesser welds on this non-pressure vessel, quite early and in the top part of the tank well above the liquid level. When you stand on top of a big tank, a lot of them do flex quite a bit. Physical pressure must have increased somehow in a way that could not be relieved without rupture.
IIRC there was some report of a "gas leak" to begin with and that could very well have been it.
I can only imagine what it's like to be one of the shift operators down there on the pavement around the tanks and pipes on a daily basis, in their flame-retardant coveralls and hardhats. Based on my vivid experience working with similar operators as I took official samples from tanks usually located in much bigger tank farms.
MMA smells so sharp that any leakage from a valve or pipe fitting gets attention much more so than other flammable liquids, for instance things like paint removers, alcohol or acetone which smell very faint by comparison. I expect that the workers had gotten accustomed to a fairly clean air environment without serious toxicity levels, and would estimate that a leak of about 1 drop per minute from a flange would be easily identified and fixed. Not only to keep the neighbors from complaining, but to keep the workers from gagging when they walk closer to that location.
If the first sign of trouble was physical tank bulging and/or suddenly stinking up the whole place with lots of MMA vapor (like from an upper tank rupture) when there is no sign of leakage on the ground, that pretty much qualifies as a "gas leak". Once the smell was no longer prominent, I would say that polymerization was well underway and there was not as much free monomer available to build up more pressure or even evaporate very much after that. If there's warm liquid MMA open to the atmosphere, you will smell it downwind.
It might be a stretch to say that "nature takes its course" when synthetic monomers spontaneously polymerize like this, but that's what some of them do best that sets them apart.
From what I understand, in the uninhibited pure monomer it doesn't take that many PPM of monomer molecules to become "activated" in some way before the chain reaction of them with remaining molecules eventually accelerates to completion. Which may be why such a low concentration of inhibitor works so well, but inhibitor must be well-dispersed within the liquid and there must be enough circulation to avoid local depletion of the inhibitor due to stagnant contact with as yet unidentified unexpected initiators. Not only should it be easy to get a random 1 liter sample from a tank (of such non-viscous material) at any time, the single sample should ideally be highly representative of the entire tank contents. Due to the way the liquid is handled in bulk going in & out of the tank, as well as any additional circulation to insure good mixing of incoming cargo, or after boosting inhibitor amounts when only a few carefully measured pounds or kilos of the concentrated inhibitor is dumped into the bulk monomer to keep it from going below spec.
The inhibitors have been selected to be very strong and effective at what they do so it doesn't require a high concentration, and the downstream processors can more easily overcome the inhibitor effect and produce plastics using different and milder polymerization initiator techniques when there is not an excess of inhibitor.
Once it gets polymerizing past that minuscule little inhibitor, from that point it's like there is no inhibitor at all. So there is some possibility that this is a fairly worst-case runaway polymerization event where the full amount of caution was rightfully warranted. Even though it would have to be considered fairly benign compared to a whole tank of the liquid monomer dispersing through the neighborhoods, or going up in a fireball, which is always a risk anyway :\
Under storage, it really is tremendous force that the inhibitor is holding back, considering how badly outnumbered it is by the 99.9% of everything else in the tank that wants to spontaneously react with itself otherwise. When the inhibitor is only about 20 PPM, which in percent is 0.0020%, in these cases percent by weight. IOW 20 lbs of MEHQ crystals dissolved in every million lbs of MMA liquid, or in metric 20 kilos of inhibitor for every million kilos of cargo.
Now usually the lowest inhibitor concentration will be at the chemical plant that produces the monomers, and it may go into bulk storage the same way when fresh material is moving through the system adequately. From there, vessels, rail cars and trailers often have different amounts of additional inhibitor added in order to boost levels according to purchase agreements of the different industrial consumers.
Often by contractors such as companies I have worked for who store the inhibitor concentrate as agents for the client, and can sample industrial tanks & test in the lab to routinely determine inhibitor concentration. Then carefully measure according to requirements and be the third party that certifies the new concentration after our field operator physically adds the additional dose to the tank.
For something like vessels and rail cars you just can't expect their cargo samples to accurately reflect a recently boosted inhibitor value, the small amount of inhibitor concentrate won't be adequately mixed with the rest of the bulk monomer before the ship leaves the dock or the train leaves the terminal. So it has to be certified by careful physical addition while being supported by good lab data to begin with. You expect lab readings to match the certificate after the ship gets overseas or the rail car gets across the country.
Now measuring low PPM is not always easy but you get better after a while.
Much better for me because I got to start doing it my own way as soon as I could, after first establishing as many of the predecessor techniques as possible for reference, but people still wanted more reliable results and so did I since the beginning. Ever since then, doing the continuous improvement thing for more decades than you normally get.
Things I will work with, repeatedly ;)
Fascinating! Only tangentially related: I've definitely heard of PMMA, and didn't realize it was plexiglass! It's used regularly in semiconductor fabrication. https://kayakuam.com/product/structsure/pmma-positive-resist...
(also waaaay down on the list of uses at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate) but I thought that first link was clearer. Look for "In semiconductor research and industry, PMMA aids as a resist in the electron beam lithography process.")
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.
It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.
> The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.
Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:
https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...
The comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245
I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.
I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.
Having the chemical in one location doesn't make it active all over, you need to disperse it. Like you need to shake glow-in-the-dark bracelets.
Well then... make a matrix of such fuse-containers? (say every 20cm or whatever) I guess manufacturing such a matrix would be pretty expensive though, you'd need to carefully automate its production I think. It would also definitely interfere with flow of fluid in the tank.
I was thinking multiple long skinny tubes with etchings that make them more likely to split lengthwise. Maybe with a spring loaded/powered agitator so when the tube breaks there's some mechanical flinging/mixing of the inner chemical.
But I'm not a chemical processes engineer, so I don't know how much mixing is needed. But the existing emergency plan was to inject the the chemical through a single valve, so it seems like the dispersion and mixing requirements in this case seems to be low.
Easy to imagine protective mechanisms in hindsight, now imagine you have to build a system for every tank of every chemical in the world
I am imagining some sort of regulatory system that enforces appropriate safety systems are created and installed on all similar sites in the affected jurisdiction.
Ideally a standard that can prevent similar danger elsewhere in the world too.
Or is that too fantastic?
That is active.
Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).
Typically you don't have enough surface area for that. The walls are thick enough that thermal conductivity into an ambient-temperature liquid alone is not going to be sufficient.
Uh, you can't just disconnect a pressurized 35,000 gallon tank and drop it into a an enormous pool you just keep full under it at all times.
I think the passive version is the tank stays in a pool all the time.
Riiight. That is exactly what I was thinking.
It's really unclear what you were thinking
Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.
It's cheaper.
> 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.
> 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."
That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.
Hell, it’s still amazing there was so little fallout after Bhopal.
I worked with someone whose father drove his whole family out of the killing zone in Bhopal on a two wheeler. There might not have been a strong international movement to enforce safety first behavior on transnationals, but there was fall out.
Sorry, the human impact was enormous. I meant in terms of holding the people who caused it to account.
US government actions demonstrate the value placed on a life in another country can be much lower than the statistical value here in the US. We could save a life for a few thousand dollars with malaria nets (or so it's claimed); domestically a value of $12M per saved life is considered enough to justify some safety improvement.
Because it happened in India, from perspective of US public: Out of Sight, Out of Mind
Frankly, I'm not in the least surprised.
In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.
This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.
The plant was built after the houses but likely well before we had anything resembling modern safety regulations regarding such things. It was presumably grandfathered in for no reason other than that arbitrarily putting someone out of business after the fact is generally frowned upon. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
That company (GKN Aerospace) was recently fined $900k by California for various violations dating to 2020 (including instances of incomplete records and missing permits). To be clear my intent isn't to single them out. I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
The answer to grandfathering things in is not to give them an indefinite examption from the rules; instead, give them, say, a 10 year period of exemption, giving the owner enough time to fix the defect and to spread the expense of doing so over time. It's not perfect, but eventually everything ends up being fixed.
It depends a lot on context. That's certainly a reasonable approach in some situations. However in this instance it's not clear to me that there's any possible way to comply with modern regulations. My impression is that in general it isn't permitted to keep massive tanks of hazardous industrial chemicals 500 feet from residential housing units in the middle of the city.
I think this is an example where it might have been reasonable for the taxpayers to foot a bill to facilitate their relocation 20 or 30 years ago.
Take this into context with the outsourcing of all such work to China though. Environmental regulations are assessed to be one of the largest impacts US GDP. We take that hit to protect human life, and then by all the stuff from China that they make without those regulations. We minimize any risk of harm to our citizens at the cost of their jobs, while putting the citizens of China at risk instead. My only point is that there is no right answer. It is a judgement call about how much risk we think is acceptable in trade for what modern conveniences. If paying to move the plant would cost more than what it produces provides us, we should decide whether we do without, or just accept that sometimes industrial accidents kill a few hundred people.
> I cynically assume at least some amount of that behavior to be par for the course with US chemical companies.
It's par for the course of many US companies and likely others outside the US. I have been in a lot of manufacturing/industrial facilities and find a lot of machismo coupled with greedy asshole bosses/owners/managers. You wind up with corporate culture of "keep your head down, do as your told, don't question, and get paid."
It leads to a normalization of deviance where you end up with resentful workers who don't give a shit. Then when things go wrong, management can then easily blame them for their crappy work ethic and fire them. Then hire a new person to demoralize in exchange for money. It's a scam really.
The only way to curb that behavior is to hold people responsible but we seem to be incapable of doing that because the people who need to be held responsible have too much money and power.
That's the deep dive that I want to see. A breakdown of the policy failures that lead to this situation.
Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas? Why is this chemical allowed in an area that is considered light manufacturing?
> Why is a tank this large of a chemical that can have runaway thermal reaction allowed in an area 500ft from residential areas?
Because the tank was there first and morons came later on and said they wanted to build housing, the land was cheap and no zoning was in place to prevent someone from building housing there.
Zoning saves lives.
Based on this comment’s [0] comparison of historical aerial photographs, the houses were there first.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48254291
But then no one would build Jurassic Park. And man, I want to pet Raptors and take selfies with T-Rex you know. Its a conundrum.
>Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.
And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
>Chemical A is found to be cancerous
Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?
Are you alleging that California claims stuff to be carcinogenic without evidence?
Do you have a supposed motive?
Any evidence?
Whilst it's a bit of a meme, isn't it just true that a lot of stuff is carcinogenic.
California’s threshold is far too low to be useful. The end result is basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylamide
is the one that gets me. Fried snacks from Asia frequently have a Prop 65 warning. Thing is it is produced by ordinary cooking techniques from ordinary and can be found in both traditional and ultra-processed foods.
Well, the “experts” say a charred steak is carcinogenic. At that point, I stopped listening to anything out of their mouths. It might be true, but it’s also a matter of degree.
California has set such a low threshold that one cannot take their label seriously about anything. It applies to nearly everything, making it effectively a useless warning.
It also never lists the specific substances nor what one can do about it (not enter the building, don’t lick the ceiling, wear a mask, whatever). Good intentioned but utterly useless.
> And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.
I'll bet a ton of that regulation is insufficient, and/or paid for, or even written by, the industry to make it harder for competitors or to allow them to increase their profits by cutting corners.
Regulation isn't some on/off switch that always makes things better or worse. What matters is what those regulations are and who they serve.
Yep and I bet if I reviewed every bit of it line by line I couldnt convince many people to remove any of it.
Because Regulation might not be an on/off switch but Deregulation is a complete hard no for most people.
I'd agree that deregulation is a complete hard no for most people, but that's because removing bad/watered down regulation isn't enough. Calling for "deregulation" is like saying "defund the police". A very small number of radicals claim to actually want that, but most people think that something better has to fill the void. Bad regulation needs to be replaced by good regulation.
If what you mean by "Deregulation" is "different/better regulation" most people will happily support it. For example, most people would love to have the government just automatically mail them their tax refunds with the paperwork they need to verify it was correct. Standing in their way are companies who have been spending a lot of money on bribes to make sure filing our taxes is as expensive and difficult as possible (https://www.nbcnews.com/business/taxes/turbotax-h-r-block-sp...)
There was a pretty decent campaign locally to make it legal to deliver fixed line broadband services.
But once you convince someone that the legislation exists and the penalties exist for supplying fixed line broadband services, the next goal posts slide into place, and they reflexively defend the idea that the government would fine people more for overbuilding the national carrier to a greater extent than importing several kilos of cocaine. They parrot absolutely bonkers shit like "Internet is a natural monopoly" when they literally have to fine people to make it a monopoly.
Most people defend the status quo with extreme vigor. And most people aren't even slightly qualified to analyse the status quo. The supplied alternative doesnt matter. Some person they dont know, doing something they are ambivalent about might find their profession easier. Thats completely verboten.
Are you sure that the "Internet is a natural monopoly" people were actually people and not just bots and shills? The only reason I could see real people wanting a monopoly would be if they were pushing for the government to handle the infrastructure and then lease out access to whoever wants to offer services over the lines. There's a case that it doesn't make sense to have 50 different companies all running physical cables everywhere. What doesn't make sense is only allowing one private company to do it and leaving yourself at their mercy.
"Defund the police" was such a dumb slogan. "Demilitarize the police" would have been much better.
Agreed, although in addition to that the hope was to do other things too like divert funds out of tasks the police do that they shouldn't be doing in the first place (like mental health calls and wellness checks) and into social services/EMS instead and also away from internal affairs and into independent/community oversight boards (no more policing themselves).
I doubt any pithy slogan would have encompassed all of it, but the least they could have done was avoid something that most people would reject instantly for being insane. It's amazing that so many people managed to get past the slogan at all to get into the "well actually what we mean is..." and it was totally predictable that the slogan would be weaponized against the movement by opponents
Complaining about the Chevy Cruze like that is hilarious. Did you go out of your way to pick up a particularly harmless example?
What about all the other cars that kill significantly more people by design? Like, I don’t know, any SUV or pickup truck? In that context, picking on the rather innocent Cruze seems a bit obtuse.
I just want to derail this thread to note that it was the Chevy Cobalt, the predecessor to the Cruze, which was part of the GM ignition switch thing which killed something like 100-250 people depending on whose numbers you believe in the I believe on-going lawsuits.
AFAIK there were no similar ignition switch failures or associated deaths with the Cruze (or other >2011 model year vehicles), although I think it might have been part of the recall.
Shouldn't any design that is killing people, no matter how petty you think it is, be reason for homicide investigation against the companies executives?
I guess if you viewed customers as actual people the 'the dow is 50k - why do you want us to stop war crimes?' might also get a response requiring the treatment of humans with dignity.
If your executives can't kill people to make a couple of million what's the point of even being a wage-slave./s
No, because some killing is necessary for the economy to function. Reduction to zero means elimination of the product.
The way this statistical background of economic death is handled is by assigning a finite value to a human life. In the US it's about $12M. If you think this is inhumane, consider that this is the cutoff for government actions for reducing deaths (from traffic accidents, disease, etc.) Actions where the cost per life saved are higher than this figure mean we're leaving on the table actions that could have saved more lives for the resources spent.
I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.
You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.
"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.
You’re reversing causality. People don’t want gore-tex, and they don’t want cobalt batteries. They want dry boots and transportation.
If some corporation comes along and says they have dry boots and electric cars, it is not realistic to expect every single consumer in a society to become expertly informed on fluorochemistry or the economics of mining, and then also expect them to make the decision that is best for all of us.
But it is a nice dodge for those profiting from outsourcing costs on the public.
From one angle, that is all modern corporations are: a mechanism for offloading costs onto the public, while privately pocketing the profit.
Which is they they all should be regulated to make sure that they're doing more good for society than harm.
Exactly, the burden for better behavior lies with the people with the power, agency, and information.
The consumer is did not decide on the formulation of Chemical X, they weren't there to see the day it accidentally melted through the floor, and if the customer was somehow a hyper-motivated scientist with the right training, the company isn't gonna share the data.
You write as if it would not be possible to work with these chemicals safely at a reasonable cost, and that's just not true. Other jurisdictions manage this.
Corporations naturally seek to improve margins, all the time, constantly. They will push and push against rules and regulations. It's the proper role of government to balance the costs to the corporation against the interests of the public. And it can be done well. But in the US, it's becoming more and more rare.
Which "Other jurisdictions manage this"?
I have lived in places with more rules, but that meant we just didn't do it. We eventually gave up.
I have read the rules are tighter in most EU nations.
There is jurisdiction shopping of course. If china or wherever wants to have really lax rules, and that means production moves there, I’m not sure what the answer is.
But, for this product (making plexiglass like things), I expect all the consumer production has gone overseas anyway. This is defense / aerospace, so it probably can’t move.
The answer is actually really easy, and it's been implemented successfully before: selective import taxes.
You set import taxes so that they offset price advantages. If a country has shitty environmental laws, crappy labor protections, etc. then you prices that into their import taxes. That way they don't gain any advantages in a race to the bottom based on things that you care about in your own country.
If a country adopts better environment laws, labor projections, etc. then you lower the import tariffs you charge on that country's relevant goods
Or we could just let it go offshore? Do we have to do everything here?
They are not saying that we have to do everything here, they are saying: If you want to move your mfg. to a country that has less environmental regulation enforcement, labor law enforcement and other things that we care about here, then the goods you are shipping back should be tariffed accordingly.
If we as a people pass environmental laws & labor laws because we feel that these things are important then why are we accepting products that are made in violation of our standards.
But... but taxes and tariffs bad!!!
Snark aside, the widespread lack of understanding of basic economic concepts is actually a real problem. On one side, you got an utter buffoon like Trump acting like taxes and tariffs are his personal revenge sledgehammer to wield however he wants, and on the other side you got (an awful lot of) short-term rewarders who will accept just about any predictable long-term consequence for short-term "lower prices for consumers".
Wow that is a hell of a lot of responsibility to heap on the consumer. I think the right/rational argument is properly regulated safety procedures for storing large quantities of extremely hazardous chemicals. There is a middle ground. This is in my view a regulatory failure if I ever saw one… who was inspecting this tank and what were they looking for? I am willing to bet the gas pump nearest me gets more attention from whoever is responsible for weights and measures.
You present this as if consumers were truthfully informed of all the ecological and labor impacts of products they buy. In many cases contrary is true, companies don't inform the customers, try to hide the impacts or downplay the impacts. Using outsourcing and very difficult to trace supply chains is often way to prevent informed public.
The idea that "If corporations can't do whatever they want, including put everyone's lives at risk, nobody will be able to have anything nice" is a commonly seen argument but of course it's a lie. Companies might make less profit if they had to act responsibly but they'd still make profits. Those that failed to don't deserve to exist and should get out of the way so that a more efficient and capable company can take their place.
The same argument could be made for all kinds of unreasonable demands. If there were products that couldn't be profitably made and sold without slavery do you think we should all just accept that slavery? We, as a society, make choices all the time that certain products, industries, and practices aren't worth the costs. Sometimes it's perfectly fine to bankrupt companies and kill entire industries to do it.
By all indications child porn could be a massively profitably industry. For a long time it was. As a society we decided that crossed a line, and we petitioned our government to outlaw it and enforce that regulation on the porn industry. The economy didn't collapse when we did. It's just as reasonable for the public to decide to demand better safety from the chemical industry and ask the government to regulate that as well. It's been done many times in various forms already. The economy didn't collapse then either.
We'd agree that there is a middle ground to aim for most of the time though. The problem we have now is that government is being bribed to ignore what voters want and roll back many of the regulations we demanded. Incidents like this one remind us that companies should be expected and required to do better, but as long as government can keep accepting piles of cash in exchange for ignoring the rest of us it's not going to be easy to convince the government to do their job. There's also been an increasing amount of voter suppression to make it harder to fire and replace corrupt government with people who will do their job.
Consumers don't control zoning laws or risk mitigation details.
In a democracy they do, or at least that is the theory.
It may well be quite valid in context to let a company or even an entire industry go bankrupt if the net negative is large enough and give zero fucks if the mitigation required is practical or affordable. It may also be valid from the perspective of one group of citizens to foist the cost and risk on another nations less organized or represented citizens in another nation. Unkind but we don't pay our lawmakers to represent our citizens and theirs equally.
The average person is dumber than a box of rocks and the ones that aren't have limited time, attention, and expertise. They can't be relied on to make practical decisions while shopping on amazon regarding the practical effects of their buying power. The only hope to have sane decision making is by subject matter experts which is why we are a nation of laws which basically say follow the rules set down by these unlected assholes who actually know <insert subject> because it is literally the only practical way forward in our nation of 338M stupid assholes.
I don't want any of those things, really (besides solar panels I suppose). I avoid plastic as much as I can. But, let's take your boots example. I recently went looking for a pair of well-made boots that don't contain plastic. But that eliminates something like 99% of the available offerings, and most of the remaining are luxury brands that can cost upwards of 600 dollars. I don't have that kind of budget, so I had to compromise. Do you see the problem here? If I want decent boots without a luxury brand fee, I HAVE to give these chemical companies my money. Extend that to clothing, groceries, furniture, devices, etc etc.
I avoid this stuff as much as I can without upending my life, and I'm still forking over much of my spending to companies that can pollute my land, water, and air with near impunity. I didn't choose this shit!
context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Grove_chemical_leak
When this is all over, when they peel the metal tank away, will they have a gigantic clear block of material?
World's largest Outstanding Service Award.
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
So... maybe?
A couple weeks ago when they called me back to the lab the supervisor had one of the clear polymer disks on their desk that had formed in a pint sample bottle that was about half full.
The sample recycling operator came across the occasional one that had polymerized, over months of identical ambient storage to the other bottles in the case which could still be handled as liquids.
Broke it out of the bottle and brought it into the office, where it was completely odorless and sitting there like a promotional acrylic paperweight with nothing embedded inside to promote :)
If this tank has a giant disk of clear acrylic at the bottom, it "might" be unprecedented to remove it intact and turn it into a fairly sizable lens if possible. If not clear, maybe even a mirror of some kind anyway.
Ooh, like when a bottle of Krazy Glue dries out? I kinda hope so...
Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.
There are superglue(CA) accelerators sold, is that just a big scam? Because as far as I can tell a spray bottle with water works just as well.
Water but it's a bit of hit and miss that can turn soggy, better is bicarbonate that triggers are more or less instant reaction (often in baking powder in a pinch, but that's mostly a waste compared to just bicarb).
Often if one wants to make something "larger", dropping superglue, adding bicarb with a silt, blowing away and dropping another layer works fairly well (it's a bit of a brittle but still quite hard mass that is created quickly).
I've rebuilt my old laptop's hinges this way, building up little by little, almost 3d printing crudely by hand.
Then at some point I realized that I overdid it!
Easy-peasy, a file and sandpaper to the rescue, I thought.
Aand.. I spent x3 more time shaving off the excess than building it! It's super tough.
I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk
Not a scam.
Also, your breath might help in a pinch (it's humid).
The best CA accelerator I know is baking soda.
Had to look that up. Pretty cool. Would've expected it to be more cloudy. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1ogb2k3/m...
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.
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.
This is also how glass chip repair works. If the polymer has a close enough index of refraction to the glass, it's invisible.
I've been told this is a cheap way to fix small windshield cracks. Never tried it but sounds like it would work for the small spider sized and shaped cracks from small rock impacts.
This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)
And, bringing this topic full circle, the chemical in those kits is methyl methacrylate!
The expensive way is superglue plus a little suction cup to evacuate the air, and a razor blade.
The KRAGLE!
Transparent Aluminum
Oh we have that too, it's used as high end window armor in some armored vehicles, it's called AlON (Aluminum OxyNitride).
It's amazing stuff.
Also [synthetic] sapphire [1] is just aluminium oxide.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire
Meanwhile in Washington, an unknown number of people where killed today in a paper mill “white liquor” explosion today…: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/26/longview-chemical-exp...
And for what, $25.00 bucks an hour? We need to take back production.
Being an armchair expert, I wondered if they couldn't have flown a quadcopter with a small drilling machine and drill a hole on the top to relive pressure?
First, there's probably a pressure relief system already on the tank.
The problem is that is analogous to drilling a hole in a pressure cooker, it's either going to rupture the tank entirely, or blast the contents into the air.
Also curious where you would get a "quadcopter with a small drilling machine" with a couple hours' notice; even if you had one, it would be hard to maintain a position at one exact spot, and much of the lift energy would be expended in the torque reaction of the drill.
I am seeing papers go by from Chinese researchers who are interested in things like using drones to do maintenance on sea platforms and they'd definitely be interested in attaching drills to drones and the like.
It seems like the issue wasn't the pressure so much, but the temperature. The contents were supposed to be stored at 50 degrees. The thermometer for the tank was reading 100 degrees, but nobody knew what the actual temperature was, because the thermometer's maximum reading was 100. So the challenge was to figure out how to cool things down (which would relieve the pressure in turn)
All process tanks I've seen have various cleanout hatches, drain valves, pressure relief blowoff valves... even your water heater has these. Not sure about this tank in particular and obviously there were no easy answers in this particular event, but hopefully lessons will be learned.
Whenever I read anything by this guy I just think of George Creel and his Committee on Public Information. He's a throwback.
This reminds me of the old adage, every system is secure until someone actually tries to use it.
i always suspected that chemistry was up to something, but never thought it'd be behind something like this.
Derek Lowe is always such a great read, one of the few good things I discovered during the pandemic
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.
If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas.
Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds break which then passes the stress on to the material straight after that. This all happens very quickly and can even accelerate as the hole grows bigger and gas starts moving.
It’s very lucky that the crack that formed didn’t propagate like that. It could be for many reasons though, like the crack front could have run into thicker material or a weld line or something like that and if luckily stopped the crack.
Cracks in pressure vessels can propagate faster then the speed of sound. Which means your pressure vessel goes to flinders before any pressure is relieved.
Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.
[1] This is the hazchem code. I think the US uses a different system. A list is here: https://www.ricardo.com/media/radn55jg/dangerous-goods-emerg...
The US uses the Emergency Response Guide or ERG, which similarly lists more or less all hazardous materials and suggests appropriate responses.
Full document is here: https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/sites/phmsa.dot.gov/files/2024-04/...
Relevant guide is 129, which is on PDF page 189.
---------
SPILL OR LEAK
• ELIMINATE all ignition sources (no smoking, flares, sparks or flames) from immediate area.
• All equipment used when handling the product must be grounded.
• Do not touch or walk through spilled material. • Stop leak if you can do it without risk. • Prevent entry into waterways, sewers, basements or confined areas.
• A vapor-suppressing foam may be used to reduce vapors.
• Absorb or cover with dry earth, sand or other non-combustible material and transfer to containers.
• Use clean, non-sparking tools to collect absorbed material.
Large Spill
• Dike far ahead of liquid spill for later disposal.
• Water spray may reduce vapor, but may not prevent ignition in closed spaces.
---------
The spark could have caused an explosion.
I read that was the primary concern and wondered about drilling/piercing techniques that could avoid a spark. Spraying water sounds like the dumbest one but some kind of mud applied or something. CNC machines don’t seem to be light shows but i know very little.
My "I have no clue how this works" proposal to minimize the chance of sparking would be to re-purpose a waterjet cutter...
Okay now hear me out. What about we introduce more chemicals and eat through the tank with acid?
Wait... how could that have helped? It's a toxic material under pressure so why would we want to vent it further?
I guess that begs the next point though - the high pressure system inside would want to violently vent out to the low pressure system outside through the relatively tiny hole.
Delta P... when it's got you... it's got you.
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...
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That's the cool thing about the God Theory: any events can be explained by it.
Or He felt we needed a small reminder of what we're capable of if not careful!
He never gave us a fucking manual in the first place, so who knows what He is thinking.
> He never gave us a fucking manual in the first place, so who knows what He is thinking.
He did give us a manual. He very clearly says that slavery is okay and eating shrimp is a sin, and lots of other rules.
To be fair, there are a number of different manuals, and they don't tend to agree with each other.
Slavery is not OK. Someone indentured for owing a debt can be compelled for a maximum of six years and goes free in the seventh, with no payment required from him.
You sure? I got a manual that has lined up with expectations thus far.
It's ok to just treat it like a thing people say. When people say 'bless you' I don't explain to them that sneezing doesn't actually expel my soul from my body.
BLEVE = Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion
My parents are retired fire-fighters. They had an American pygmy goat named Bleve. Those goats commonly have very rotund stomachs[1] that look like they are about to explode.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:American_Pygmy_G...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGWmONHipVo
MythBusters have a good BLEVE episode. Apparently Adam Savage's favourite explosion.
Typically BLEVE is used in a petrochemical context, where the hot "boiling liquid, expanding vapor" ignites on contact with oxygen.
A BLEVE does not need oxygen to become an explosion. The explosion occurs with the rupture of a tank (that has been heated, increasing the internal pressure and thus increasing the boiling point of the liquid inside, so that it remains liquid). This causes a loss of rapid loss of pressure, which in turn rapidly decreases the boiling point of the liquid, thus causing a sizable part of the liquid to almost immediately boil and cause an expanding "cloud" of gas.
When this occurs, you have an explosion that can propel parts of a steel propane tank up to 1/2 mile (at least).
It doesn't need it but it makes it that much more destructive. Your propane example is such a case - as the hot cloud expands explosively it burns on contact with new oxygen and the heat serves to further perpetuate the process. An overheated tank of propane provides an illustration of the principle on which thermobaric warheads are based.
> A leak was detected in one of the fittings and an attempt was made to correct it by striking the fitting with a large wrench.
https://darwinawards.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Awards
Why bring God into the discussion? Do you think he’s monitoring our lives actively? Why is he a he? Does God have male genitalia?
Ughhh don't be this guy, please...
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Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates:
https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-ex...
This agency is the subject of a budget war between the current executive and Congress, with the former trying to cut its budget and the Congress just restoring its budget, so not sure if it will be doing a report on Garden Grove:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/congress-rescues-industr...
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46904017
I thought Trump defunded them last year? It was big news at the time.
I had thought that too, but the funding was kept there by Congress.
What the...?!
I was literally just this afternoon telling someone about TIWWW and posting them some favourites.
> 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.
On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.
I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.
It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).
So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.
You've got the right idea with the LD50 but the catch is that if it ignites it produces things that are acutely toxic in relatively small quantities.
It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).
In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)
In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.
> In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe.
This is common. Isocyanates are a common example — isocyanate monomers are nasty, and the very light ones are very nasty. They’re used to make polyurethane, polyurea and such, which are quite nontoxic in polymerized form.
In applications where the unreacted isocyanates are used by anyone other than professionals (e.g. two component varnishes), the manufacturer may go out of their way to use more expensive but less toxic variants.
Correct, PMMA is completely harmless. MMA is an incredibly common adhesive, and is in probably a dozen things in the room you are sitting in in its polymerized form.
MMA is not very toxic. It has the same LD50 as vitamin C. Table salt and baking soda are twice as toxic as MMA, for example.
Additionally it is almost certainly not in vapor form at 100 degrees. In sunlight it will also polymerize to a solid pretty quickly.
As such you'd practically have to drink it inside to hit the ld50.
The explosion would be much worse than a release of liquid or vapor based MMA during the day, and here it almost certainly solidified at this point
MMA can apparently cause some issues that are more subtle than death. I would MUCH rather eat 1g of vitamin C than 1g of MMA.
Also, vitamin C is not volatile, so there is no risk of inhaling it as a gas.
Sure it can. So can Vitamin C though.
The overall point remains the same: the toxicity, both short and long term, of MMA, is comparable to lots of everyday substances that are both commonly eaten and inhaled.
It just isn't that toxic as far as chemicals go. That doesn't mean it would be like great for you but calling it "highly toxic" is tremendously overblown and doesnt serve anyone well to claim.
Let's save the highly toxic claim for things that actually deserve it. We don't have to sensationalize everything. I maintain my view that the explosion would likely be much much worse than the odds of significant respiratory damage from MMA.
Also note the sensationalization also causes placebo effect. People miles away started claiming "their lungs hurt" when
1. There was no leak
2. Even if their was and it was a conspiracy or whatever, your lungs have ~no pain receptors and your chest/pleura/etc would generally not hurt from MMA overexposure. Your throat would and your skin would, depending on concentration. But nobody complained about skin irritation when the is basically no way to end up with one without the other.
Etc.
Sensationalization of this hurt people so far more than the actual issue!
It produces highly toxic byproducts when it burns thus the exposure concerns.
Got a source for that? I searched a bit and found so evidence that its combustion products are notably hazardous. I did find an SDS stating that MMA’s combustion products do not have special hazards.
> insanely toxic
Some quick searching suggests that it’s toxic but not even close to “insanely toxic”. And it’s not persistent in the environment.
If you want a genuinely nasty chemical, check out methyl isocyanate, which is some two orders of magnitude more acutely toxic.
I'll see your CH3NCO, and raise (CH3)2Hg -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury#Safety
- considerably more deadlier, and the mercury an element - so no clever chemical reactions can break it down into innocuous CO2, H2O, and N2.
Opened a small round bottom flask of this when I worked in the lab. Closed it immediately when I felt burning in my eyes as did others around me.
It’s toxic but not insanely toxic. Isocyanates, phosgene, gaseous cyanides - now those are insanely toxic
What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation. If we ever get hit by an earthquake or other larger disaster, it's safe to assume we're all on our own.
Also, as someone affected by this, it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
> What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation.
Can you expand on that? It seems like there wasn't a lot they could do once the tank started leaking.
> it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?
It is amazing how the modern world has a webpage for every organisation but they can't bloody update it usefully and use a random platform (Xitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, facebook) instead.
vague post
Tangent but there's a great Sublime song titled `Garden Grove`. Looks like they made a modern video for it that presumably shows a lot of Garden Grove. Or it could be Long Beach, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSo_zj0UQw