explosion
gregladen | January 28, 2015Suddenly and for the first time I saw Amanda as a little child wide eyed with both awe and fear, among other children some sitting on the floor, some in chairs, some standing behind desks, eyes trained on a TV monitor and their teacher as the sudden realization dawned on all of them that the Space Shuttle Challenger had been consumed in a fiery, deadly explosion.
The teacher on board seemed to have been incinerated before their very eyes. As the explosion developed, shooting out huge arms of smoke, and the voice-over began to acknowledge that something was wrong, NASA's space program was…
cmonforton | September 29, 2011One Middleton, Massachusetts resident thought it was an earthquake. Others said it sounded like a sonic boom. When Mr. Charlie Veradt heard the explosion, he said "I knew right off the bat that it was down the street," referring to the Bostik Inc. chemical plant owned by the global giant, petrochemical firm TOTAL. Just before 8:00 pm on Sunday, March 13, part of the plant exploded.
"'...We were sitting having dinner and then all of the sudden we thought the house was caving in,' said Joyce Cucchiara, who lives near the explosion. 'It was just unbelievable.'"
The explosion sent four…
egrossman | January 21, 2011by Elizabeth Grossman
On August 28, 2008 at 10:53 p.m., a massive explosion and fire, caused by a runaway chemical reaction, ripped through the Bayer CropScience pesticide plant in Institute, West Virginia. It killed two workers and injured eight employees, two contractors, and six fire-fighters, all of whom were treated for possible toxic chemical exposure. On January 20, 2011, the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board (CSB) released its investigation report. Each of its key findings points to a disaster waiting to happen.
The incident occurred at the facility's Methomyl-Larvin…
sastyk | September 2, 2010Yesterday I was on the phone with my Rabbi, who was asking me for data bout the BP oil spill and wanted to know whether there was any connection to peak oil. I told him that there certainly is - the BP oil spill is in many measures a consequence of a society under deep pressure to develop every conceivable source of oil, at great monetary, energy and ecological cost. The connection to peak oil is obvious - once upon a time, one dug a well in the ground and oil came spurting up - the version of oil prospecting one can still see in Bugs Bunny Cartoons today.
Now increasingly, the world's…
rallain | August 23, 2009I saw this video on digg or reddit. I can't remember which.
I was in awe. Then I started thinking. I wonder how fast that water was moving up right after the explosion. Too bad the video doesn't have a scale. Well, it kind of does - there is that ship. I am terrible at ship identification though. Maybe I can use my favorite scaling trick - assume the stuff is on the surface of the Earth. This means that free falling objects would have an acceleration of -9.8 m/s2. Let me try this on the water as it falls. Oh, trust me. I know it is not really free falling, but it is in this big…