Posted on 10/04/2017 8:30:37 AM PDT by who knows what evil?
My wife just called to report an explosion at the Eastman Chemical Plant, located in Kingsport, Tennessee. She said that the blast shook the building she works in, roughly two miles away. Media just arriving on scene, so no details as of yet.
Great. My BIL is the General Manager of Eastman Kingsport. It could be a long day.
More details at www.wjhl.com.
Thanks for the 411, I should have known, DOH! I know H-VAC! It’s just not common parlance in my neck of the woods - folks just say “AC” or “air conditioners”.
“(395 million troy ounces, according to Wikipedia). It was all returned when electromagnetic processing became obsolete; about 0.036% was unaccounted for”
142,200 ounces of silver missing.
Yeah, not a trivial amount.
I don’t think they had metal detectors at the employee entrances back then, but I’m not sure.
The did have radiation detectors, IIRC.
They had to work the silver bars into a form that could be run through wire-drawing machines; they also had to make bus-bar connectors that had holes drilled in them, were machined on lathes, etc. I’m sure a substantial amount ended up as filings, turnings, etc.
Silver was about $6/oz back in the WWII days, so 142,000 oz is about $860K. The Y-12 plant cost several hundred million dollars to build and many millions a year to operate, so the silver lost is more or less a rounding error.
The towns and cities around the Manhattan District plants were crawling with FBI agents and other law-enforcement types back then, so I think anyone wanting to cash in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of silver would have drawn attention pretty fast. Of course, it could have been stored away until after the war.
10 sec vid of the “upset”:
http://wate.com/2017/10/04/explosion-reported-at-eastman-chemical-in-kingsport/
Hope nothing bad for Eastman (or any people), they’re the economic engine of the area!
Bump that!
“Eastman has removed the precautionary shelter in place advisory Wednesday for its corporate campus and surrounding community, except for those within a half-mile radius of the intersection of John B. Dennis and Moreland Drive, and personnel inside the Kingsport plant perimeter.
...No injuries have been reported. The incident was reported to the proper regulatory authorities.
We expect to have an assessment by 3 p.m. whether the localized shelter in place advisory will be lifted.”
http://www.timesnews.net/Local/2017/10/04/Explosion-reported-at-Eastman.html?ci=stream&lp=1&p=
Yikes. That’s about all that’s left of Kodak, innit?
to ensure supplies of the basic chemicals he needed for his photographic film business
That’s about as vertical a company as you can get, much like Henry Ford’s Rouge River plant, where minerals went in and Model A’s came out.
That is roughly the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. If we apply climate change theory to the US treasury,that amount should have caused it to melt the polar ice caps.
Bluntville and Johnson City, right?
Don’t they process a coal slurry at that plant?
Eastman Chemical was spun off from Eastman Kodak in 1992.
The current issue of Forbes lists the top 100 companies since 1917 and what become of them. It indicated Eastman Chemical is all that remains of what was one of America’s largest companies.
I rode by the Kodak offices in Rochester a few years back and it was sad to see the large parking lots with weeds literally growing up in the expansion joints.
Meanwhile in Kingsport, Eastman Chemical has just completed a glass clad building that allowed employees scattered all over the plant to be in more or less one building. Eastman in Kingsport was always a plant, a utilitarian outpost of Rochester.
The new building is the certain evidence that the”plant utilitarian architectural mandate” from Rochester is dead and gone. That now holds true for all of Kingsport where splendid architectural efforts have been built. The Kodak architectural shackles have been broken.
The plant is divided into several zones and when there is any incident the affected zone is shut down to stop the ordinary traffic to insure the various emergency and security traffic is not impeded. Eastman is a city within a city and has lots of traffic on relatively narrow streets within the all encompassing jungle of pipes and pipes and more pipes and tanks. It is necessary to have employees in the non effected zones to curtail activity for a while to insure the traffic flow is not adversely impeded.
.Tri-Cities are Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City...Blountville sits in the middle of all three.
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