Posted on 06/23/2021 9:03:23 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A water tank exploded in a Central Valley community, lifting 70 feet into the air, killing a man and prompting a state of emergency in the city of Lemoore this week.
The incident was captured on astonishing surveillance video.
When the 1.5 million-gallon city water tank ruptured Monday afternoon, the massive container flew into the air, then crumpled on impact, authorities said.
City officials released new footage Tuesday night that captured the moment the tank exploded, hurting a city employee and killing a contractor.
(Excerpt) Read more at ktla.com ...
Could be White Nationalist terror - best to round up all the white people in town just to be safe.
So what can explode in a water tank? Accumulation of methane?
Dunno. Kinda hoping somebody here knows the answer to that question.
Never smoke while filling a water tank. Always have water nearby.
My guess is the whole town was under-vaccinated.
Hold mah Beer and watch me weld?
“My guess is the whole town was under-vaccinated.”
LOL! Now that’s funny!
How in the world does 100% of the circumferential weld fail instantaneously? You’d expect a localized failure, not the entire weld holding the tank to the base to let god at once. Was the entire tank 100% full and they kept pressurizing it? Are there no pressure safety valves?
How often do water tanks fail like that?
That is one of the most incredible failure videos I’ve seen.
I think the reporterette doesn’t know what “explosion” means. It wasn’t an explosion in the normal sense (unless somebody set a depth charge off IN the tank). It appears to be an overpressure situation with the remarkable failure of 100% of the circumferential weld attaching the tank walls to the base.
What was the explosive gas in the tank?
>Are there no pressure safety valves?
THERE is the operative question.
There is a flash of orange about 8 seconds into the video as the tank is going up, I wonder if the well was pumping up methane in addition to the water.
My guess is that this welding was going on near or below the tank in a confined space that had not been properly purged of some gas that had settled there, be it methane or some other explosive gas. Open flame meets gas in confined space = KABLOOEY.
Any water tank of that kind would be open to atmosphere and at atmospheric pressure.
It could be slightly pressurized by overfilling the tank but that would be immediately obvious because water would be shooting out the vent and splashing on the ground.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that the head space inside the tank was somehow field with an explosive mixture of gas that was ignited by the welder.
Because water is incompressible the extreme pressure caused by the ignited gas would cause the weld at the base of the tank to fail. The pressure of the explosion and the weight of the water lifted the tank.
My guess is that natural gas somehow leaked into the tank either from the ground or from some connection to the incoming piping.
“..overpressure situation ..”
I suppose that’s possible, but it’s hard to imagine the tank would have no overpressure relief valve. It gets hot as hell out there, and I guess water is added and subtracted all the time, probably from a fairly large pipe. That just didn’t look like a ~~3 psi overpressure explosion to me.
That’s a good theory. Thumps up….
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