“Beef Stroganoff...you’re doing it wrong.”
Posted on 11/15/2008 10:36:39 AM PST by LibWhacker
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) – A Russian woman who fell into a pit of boiling water after parking her car died Tuesday from burns, a hospital official said.
The hole was caused by a ruptured underground heating pipe.
"She parked her car, left it, and immediately found herself in boiling water," said an official at the Military Medical Academy in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Umm, it’s the way they heat their buildings.
Wow, that sucks. That’s all I can really say.
Didn't this happen in NYC when a steam pipe exploded and the man sitting in a tow truck fell into the hole?
But they work great all summer!
Wait... did she step out of the car and fall immediately into the boiling water? Or did she walk away from the car in to it?
Hey, I don’t doubt it. But it’s completely irrational.
True, I think municipal steam was the peak of, oh, 1890's technology. The heat loss must be extravagant. Not to mention those nasty occasional pits of boiling water.
In Manhattan, they have steam pipes running under the streets, delivering pressurized steam to buildings for heating.
Now that the (crumbling) infrastructure is in place, it's difficult to modernize the way out of it.
Little known fact: The greatest cause of death in Yellowstone, aside from vehicle accidents is falling/stepping/jumping into extremely hot pools in the thermal areas.
Sort of gives you that Big Soviet Propaganda Machine image in the head, what with a poster showing somebody holding a wrench upheld in a fist. It's Mario Bros meets Tetris! Keep the homes of the proletariat supplied with People's Heat while the evil forces of capitalism corrode Glorious Pipes!
Yep, exactly what I was thinking!
I wonder if there was a problem with the translation here? I can understand delivering steam, especially a hundred years ago. It's relatively cheap to deliver steam, but it'd be a whole 'nuther kettle of fish to deliver thousands and thousands of tons of boiling water.
District heating used to be common in the core area of cities. A central boiler was much more efficient than having boilers in every building — especially, back when the main source of heat was coal. With district heating, there was no need to have stationary engineers (3 shifts) in every building.
District heating plants are still common on university and industrial campuses.
>Sort of gives you that Big Soviet Propaganda Machine image in the head, what with a poster showing
>somebody holding a wrench upheld in a fist. It’s Mario Bros meets Tetris! Keep the homes of the
>proletariat supplied with People’s Heat while the evil forces of capitalism corrode Glorious Pipes!
Bum-ba-du-dum-da-da-dum...du-dumdu-du
Great, now I have the Tetris theme stuck in my head. Thanks a lot.
It's actually pretty efficient, with heat loss from buried pipes being fairly low. They use steam that was created anyway for electricity generation. See here. The way most power plants work is to heat water into ultra-hot steam, which runs through a turbine to generate electricity, then condensed back into water and run through again. What they do in NYC is to just route the spent steam into pipes into the city.
“Beef Stroganoff...you’re doing it wrong.”
back in the 1970’s a young student was walking across SUNY Stony Brook campus on Long Island and fell into and open man hole where live steam was piped.
he was cooked alive.
Yes, it’s probably steam heat. Steam heat systems were also common in older houses and apartment buildings, too, before there was a general switch over to circulating hot water heat.
Steam heat is still pretty common in Manhattan. I know that the main classroom buildings at NYU are heated that way.
If a steam heat pipe burst and blew a hole up through the ground and the street, you’d likely end up with a big pool of boiling hot water in the resulting hole.
It was a ruptured pipe. So, the steam/water probably pooled for some time and washed-out the gravel beneath the pavement before she fell through. My guess. God rest her soul.
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