alt Hacker NewsThat Methyl Methacrylate Tank
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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:
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).
When this is all over, when they peel the metal tank away, will they have a gigantic clear block of material?
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...
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?
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.
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...
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...
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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.
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?
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 ;-(