The Bellingham, Washington pipeline explosion (3 kids killed) was partially due to “Y2K”. They had replaced remote indicator switches on the valves to be Y2K compliant.
They had a problem with one of the indicators on a valve. The computer would say the valve was closed so they would spend two hours or whatever it was for a technician to get to the valve and the valve would be open. This happened three times I think.
The fourth time they said “Oh - that’s just that faulty indicator again.” So they sent the fuel (jet fuel iirc). Except this time it really was closed. The fuel hit the closed valve and then sent a pressure wave back up the line. And it went to a nearby bend in the line that had been damaged a few years prior but nobody knew it.
Pipeline burst and spilled a bunch of the fuel into a park. Two little kids (10 years??) were playing with a lighter that they had found and “boom”. A teen fishing upstream had died from the fumes.
Those two little boys probably saved more people from dying. It exploded in the mostly empty park which was just before a populated area where a car or something would have set it off.
Wow. I didn’t know that.
A hammer in a hydraulic system is nothing to sneeze at.
That is what happened at Three Mile Island, where they ran out of head room in an expansion area in the system and when a bunch of valves closed automatically, it sent a hydraulic hammer through the water cooling system that demolished lines and valves and tore them from the walls.
There was a guy standing on the pipe, and he actually SAW the shock wave coming in the pipe and just managed to jump clear.
If they had that expansion room left in that system, there wouldn’t have been a catastrophic failure.