Posted on 08/07/2002 8:17:45 AM PDT by My Favorite Headache
Fire burning out of control in Quincy, Mass just outside Boston. Ferterlizer is stocked inside building....developing
Never in a thousand years!!
Red
Wow, you were there? Cool.
I remember reading (with morbid fascination) an article about the ship channel explosion in a copy of Popular Science when I was in third grade (1963). It made a permanent impression on me.
I wonder how big the shockwave expanded to? I don't suppose that many who saw it lived to tell the tale.
(steely)
The surface area of your window was probably about 10 sq ft... and the surface area of a gas storage tank might be 10,000 sq ft or maybe more.
I would want good security near those tanks.
I can testify to this. I was sitting in my 4th grade classroom in Port Arthur when the shock hit the building, Tyrrell School about 100 miles away. The teacher was visibly shaken as we all were.
I was getting dressed when the explosion occurred. I was getting ready for the afternoon session at Danforth Elementary School, where I went to school. Fortunately, I had leaned over to get my shoes when the blast knocked the window out right above me. Everything was covered with broken glass. I think some kids in the morning session at Danforth were hurt because some of the walls of the school collapsed.
My father worked at one of the refineries. He fought fires for two days straight and passed out caught in a barbed wire fence after running from an exploding tank. Some people driving by picked him up and took him to their house. He was reported as missing over the radio but was OK.
Dad had been invited by his boss to go down to the docks to watch the Grandcamp fire. Fortunately, Dad was too busy to go. The boss's body washed up in Galveston Bay a week later.
That's prolly a giant squid just offshore, they can grow to 60 feet long or more.
Don't let Clinton hear about this.
The story about your dad reminds me a little of the Exxon oil refinery fire in Baton Rouge, Louisiana back in Christmas, 1986 (or thereabout). During the day, half the sky was obscured by black oil smoke, and at night the blaze was a supernatural column of boiling flame -- it was quite a sight. We went out to the levee, set up lawn chairs and watched it from across the river.
The funny thing was that it's a Christmans tradition in Baton Rouge to build bonfires out on the levee -- big elaborate wooden structures in the shape of houses and animals and stuff -- which they then set ablaze on Christmas Eve. Well, as you can imagine, the Exxon refinery stole the show that year.
The blast that killed the firefighters years ago? We live about 18 miles from where that happened and felt the blast. Good friends lived about a mile away and were almost thrown out of bed. They thought their house had exlpoded.
Photos included.
"RUSTY!"
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