Cooking oil???
Wow - that’s a failure waiting to happen.
Very lucky that the access port blew. Was there a fire?
I recall the story about a transformer that overheated and ruptured, with personnel in the substation working on the tap changer on the other transformer. They were, fortunately, on the opposite side of the second transformer and shielded from the hot oil that spewed out.
And get this - the reason it blew is that after a corporate merger, the management decided that over temperature tripping was not useful on distribution substations so they disabled that function. In other words, the transformer should have tripped off line prior to the point of failure, but that level of protection was deemed unnecessary by the new management team.
A very costly mistake - took about a day to set up the mobile transformer to feed the customer load - there were insufficient ties to pick up all the load from other sources. Needless to day, changes have since been made.
It was filled with transformer oil, exposure to a soaking of it at 500 degrees would be similar...
The transformer has very specific fill lines to allow for oil expansion over a range of temperatures. Fill it to the brim and it’s almost certainly going to pop!
A quiet boom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFkfd31Wpng
I was involved in the clean-up of a 345kV xfmr at a coal plant, circa 1988.
Didn’t see it but, what a mess.
Quick question. Should i fill out the census? I am loathe to give them any information about myself.