[nuconvert]

1st I'd heard the number increased from 3 dead. Sad

[Buckeye McFrog]

for my Yinzer brethren who have never spent any time out on the Great Plains...

These grain elevator explosions are all too common and extremely deadly! Farming is not only hard work...it can be pretty damned dangerous too.

[libstripper]

This kind of an explosion is probably what sank the Lusitania, accoding to Bob Ballard, the man who found the wreck of the Titanic. His theory is that Luistania was at the eend of her crossing from the USA to the UK with mostly empty coal bunkers, the engine room crew had been moving the coal about constantly to maintain the ship's trim, and the bunkers were therefore filled with clouds of highly explosive coal dust. Thus, when the German torpedo hit the ship, the blast from the torpedo was like a detonator setting off an explosive, and Lusitania sank in about 15 minutes, her entire bottom being blown out.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

Dust implosions can be extremely powerful. A single cup of flour, when vaporized, can have the explosive force of two sticks of dynamite.

This is one of the reasons that coal mining is so incredibly dangerous, and mines have to be kept “swampy” with water, because the combination of coal dust and flammable gases in the mine is a recipe for disaster.

The reason for the danger is that fine dust has a vast surface area exposed to the air, because of the small size of particles, so oxidation is very fast.

[The Great RJ]

In October, 1985, the same type of grain elevator explosion killed three people in my home town in South Dakota.