Fertilizer plant explodes near Waco, Texas | Hacker News Reader

Fertilizer plant explodes near Waco, Texas

theatlanticwire.com

35 pointsvecter24 comments

For those who didn't click through to the article, this video is crazy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA

The explosion happens at 0:29.

Before watching the video, switch off the sound.

Or leave it. Most people have only seen explosions in the movie, where the hero hides behind a tree and walks it off. This shows you how it really happens in real life.

That is incredible.

I love how cable news now is juts basically youtube videos looping over and over and amateur photos because they have zero in-field reporter budgets. Opinion and talking heads are far cheaper and people watch anyway.

Cannot wait until corporate news loses all power.

As far as broadcast news, why exactly are we giving them airspace?

But they are thrilled, just incredibly relieved, they have something else to talk about since they ran out of facts about Boston two days ago. I mean it's not like any hope for national gun control was completely thrown out the window today.

I happened to be (unfortunately) watching the coverage on CNN. Sanjay Gupta...a DOCTOR said

"just about any chemical you can think of is at some point in a fertilizer plant"

When you have nothing factual to talk about, ratchet up the fear to keep the viewers on baited breath.

> amateur photos because they have zero in-field reporter budgets.

Err... could it also be that with mobile phones, cameras, tablets, etc... that there are now far more devices out there capable of recording stuff before reporters, lugging their gear, arrive somewhere?

Here's the thing. It was never better. Never. In the past we had no other conduits of information, no ability to compare. We were fed dreck and we thought it was a deep insight into the world and the way it worked. But in reality it was 95% monopoly access to information streams, prettied up with sexy graphics and beautiful people with good speaking voices. Getting opinions from other talking heads who didn't know what the fuck they were talking about but worked in important places. But all of that was based on the teeny-tiny-est kernel of legitimate journalism. And we ate it up with a spoon. We thought it was absolute truth wrapped up in a blanket of deep, serious gravitas handed to us from on high. It was a stage production, as much then as it is now.

Apparently, there were some pretty strong explosions before:

Halifax explosion - a ship carrying 2000+ tons of high explosives, exploded in the middle of Halifax harbor completely obliterating the whole town, evaporating all the water in the harbor, creating 18 m tsunami, throwing the gun barrel from a ship 5km away.

Just 2 years ago there was this huge explosion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelos_Florakis_Naval_Base_e... with more than 2kt TNT equivalent yield, check these before http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident-cy/20%20June%... and after image http://www.hellas-sat.net/files/image/accident-cy/12%20July%...

I live near the middle of the area destroyed in the Halifax Explosion.

It was pretty significant, but didn't obliterate the whole town. The Richmond district (which is in the east part of the Halifax North End) was almost completely wiped out, almost 2000 people died and 9000 Haligonians were injured out of a population of 65,000.

If you ever watch the Harrison Ford movie, K-19: The Widowmaker, you'd see the area of the Halifax North End that was affected, it was the location for shots in the film that stood for the Soviet-era Sevmash shipyard.

http://www.halifaxexplosion.org/intro.html

This is a really sad event for the locals considering Waco is a rather small town of about 126,000 people, the plant hired a lot of people. I think the saddest part of all of this is the comments on most of the news articles you read about the explosion (including the one linked). People are drawing all sorts of conclusions from it being related to the Boston bombing incident to it being an attack by North Korea and arguing over trivial-political nonsense that doesn't even relate to the story.

The explosion is probably one of the scariest things you'll ever see, imagine being within a mere few hundred metres of the explosion and the amount of G's that would be emitted, for survivors who were close by I couldn't imagine anything more terrifying. My heart goes out to the locals in Waco and those who've lost family/friends.

>The explosion is probably one of the scariest things you'll ever see

Come on, please could we stop losing perspective here? It is by far from one of the scariest things that have happened in my lifetime, it is a tragedy for those afflicted by it - but accidents like this probably happen every few months somewhere in the world.

Maybe not scary watching it via a Youtube embed... Nobody is losing perspective, I can't imagine anything scarier than being inside of or close to a fertiliser factory housing toxic chemicals exploding, can you? Except maybe being a victim of an atomic blast, but that doesn't happen everyday. Factories housing deadly chemicals don't just explode every few months, I don't recall the last time I heard of anything like this happening. Calm down.

This is absolutely crazy. I will tell my professor, and hopefully we can do a case study on how to prevent explosions like these.

Best guess is blatant disregard for safety procedure, like Chernobyl.

This comment sums it up, http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/1cktrt/fertilizer...

really!!! keep me posted brah!

>Please read the comment guidelines.

I just did, and didn't see anything I violated. I could be wrong though, and would love to correct my behavior. I said it was absolutely crazy because if you go frame-by-frame there is literally a flash of white in a single frame, then the explosion. No build-up, no nothing. It happened within 3/24 of a second. If you make some estimate of the scale, you could use dimensional analysis to estimate the energy of the explosion. The time scales are a little large, but it could be done to probably two orders of magnitude.

Ignore the trolls.

That's a really poor article, just pictures and no facts.

BBC w/ ongoing coverage: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22195495

CNN w/ ongoing coverage: http://us.cnn.com/2013/04/18/us/texas-explosion/index.html?h...

The casualty reports are all over the place, sources are saying anywhere from 2 to 70 killed; 60 to 200 injured. Nearby buildings and homes destroyed. There is a nursing home right next to it, fate currently unknown. Regardless, a real tragedy.

Hopefully this causes some heads to roll: "West fertilizer plant said in report that it presented no risk": http://www.dallasnews.com/news/state/headlines/20130417-west...

I'm not surprised. There was obviously a very complacent attitude at the plant, otherwise this accident would not have happened.

Given how explosive nitrogen compounds are (they all want to turn back into N2 gas, some of them more badly than others), I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often.

Well they certainly do happen:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Disaster

Ammonium nitrate is nothing to trifle with: "As all involved died in the explosion, the causes are not clear",

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