That Methyl Methacrylate Tank

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/methyl-methacrylate-tank

by nooks • 2 months ago

432 182 2 months ago

science.org

HoldOnAMinute• 2 months ago

When this is all over, when they peel the metal tank away, will they have a gigantic clear block of material?

cryzinger• 2 months ago

Ooh, like when a bottle of Krazy Glue dries out? I kinda hope so...

xnx• 2 months ago

Had to look that up. Pretty cool. Would've expected it to be more cloudy. https://www.reddit.com/r/mildyinteresting/comments/1ogb2k3/m...

bombcar• 2 months ago

The KRAGLE!

devilbunny• 2 months ago

Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.

itishappy4• 2 months ago

https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...

So... maybe?

fuzzfactor2• 2 months ago

A couple weeks ago when they called me back to the lab the supervisor had one of the clear polymer disks on their desk that had formed in a pint sample bottle that was about half full.

The sample recycling operator came across the occasional one that had polymerized, over months of identical ambient storage to the other bottles in the case which could still be handled as liquids.

Broke it out of the bottle and brought it into the office, where it was completely odorless and sitting there like a promotional acrylic paperweight with nothing embedded inside to promote :)

If this tank has a giant disk of clear acrylic at the bottom, it "might" be unprecedented to remove it intact and turn it into a fairly sizable lens if possible. If not clear, maybe even a mirror of some kind anyway.

Although there is probably some internal piping from inside the tank, embedded for display purposes primarily at this point ;)

CGMthrowaway• 2 months ago

World's largest Outstanding Service Award.

dboreham• 2 months ago

Transparent Aluminum

EA-3167• 2 months ago

Oh we have that too, it's used as high end window armor in some armored vehicles, it's called AlON (Aluminum OxyNitride).

It's amazing stuff.

robocat5• 2 months ago

Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?

After a big earthquake you don't want to have to also deal with other emergencies (à la Fukushima).

Aside: One good side-effect of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake being so horrific is that it stopped the self-obsessed whinging in my city (Christchurch was still trying to recover from an earthquake).

largbae• 2 months ago

Based on the article, the inhibitor chemicals _are_ the passive protection system, they just can't be perfect because too much of that stuff ruins the purpose for having the chemical in the first place.

itishappy4• 2 months ago

It can actually make it more dangerous in some ways. When you go to use it, too much inhibitor and the conditions needed to start the reaction will start to get wild, so the reaction will occur faster once started.

The use of high levels of inhibitor can cause the monomer system temperature to far exceed the onset temperature of thermal polymerization under external heating. Once the inhibitor is exhausted, the thermal runaway reaction proceeds at an elevated temperature with a substantial reaction rate and very little reactant/monomer consumption.

Source: This fascinating paper linked to by fuzzfactor in yesterday's (edit: 3 days ago, lol) thread:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

The comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245

dan_sbl• 2 months ago

I believe they tried to inject some chemicals to slow the reaction, but the pump and/or valves failed and clogged.

robocat5• 2 months ago

That is active.

Something passive could be submerging the tank in a pool of water (also good for proving spill containment won't leak).

kenhwang2• 2 months ago

I was thinking maybe have those chemicals sitting in a glass or temperature sensitive container inside the tank. So when there's too much pressure or heat, the container containing the neutralizing chemical is broken like a fuse and the chemical is automatically released.

KennyBlanken2• 2 months ago

Why wouldn't there be passive protection systems designed in?

Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.

There's a neutralizing chemical that could have been injected to stop the exothermic reaction in its tracks. They didn't have it on site. A "response team" (likely a contractor that responds to chemical emergencies) did, but by the time they showed up, supposedly things were too damaged to inject it. That neutralizer should have been a Big Red Switch away.

They also should have had a deluge system, for example, to cool the tank. With a standpipe for firefighters if there's no water available onsite. Was there? Nope! No requirement for it. Despite the dangers of this stuff being very well documented, it having caused disasters before, etc.

Consider that the chemical industry can invent a new chemical and the onus is on everyone else to prove it is hazardous. So what does the US chemical industry do? Spend lots of time "innovating" new versions of chemicals to constantly leverage the 'innocent until proven guilty' scam. Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."

Protection systems cost money. If something really bad happens the cost of the disaster far outweighs whatever assets the company has hanging around, and in the US, we basically never hold anybody responsible for what they do in the course of their job running a corporation. GM willfully ignored problems with Chevy Cruze ignition switches that caused countless people to die because they'd randomly shut off _and shutting off meant the airbags would get disabled_. Did anyone in those teams, or their managers, ever get held accountable? Nope, not except in some civil suits, where Chevy repeatedly claimed they didn't have any documentation. Well, at some point Congress went after them for something, and in the massive pile of documents lo and behold there wer piles and piles and piles of documentation about the ignition switch issues.

A company like that isn't even required to carry a lick of insurance, far as I'm aware. Meanwhile, and I wish I were joking on this - if I want to get a permit to set aside space in front of my apartment building to park a moving truck, I have to carry a million dollars insurance that protects the city.

If I park my car blocking an ambulance I get charged with at least one crime, possibly even manslaughter or homicide. Ditto for blocking a fire truck trying to get to a fire. A railroad can do it to half a county, dozens of times a year, and everyone just shrugs as people are harmed or killed, or half a neighborhood burned down. All because private equity is milking the railroad so tight that it's making trains that are miles long instead of lengths that are appropriate for the tracks they're on and won't block fire trucks, ambulances, police cars, school busses, and the general population as a whole.

The free license corporate America gets to shit all over society has got to stop.

oceanplexian• 2 months ago

I feel like these arguments are always framed as an evil corporation wants to take advantage of consumers. Except that's misdirection. The guilty party isn't the corporation, it's you, the consumer. And the corporations are already regulated. Heavily.

You want Gore-Tex (expanded PTFE) boots, Cobalt EV batteries (Child labor in the DRC), Solar Panels (Open pit quartz mines), Wind Turbine Blades (Epoxy Resins & glass-like fibers), and so on. All those things sound nice and good for the environment but don't appear out of some magical horn of plenty. All those things require intensive chemical and industrial processes that cost a lot of money.

"Just make the government solve the problem by criminalizing their entire operation" isn't a serious solution. It's a generic anti-corporation/NIMBY argument to outsource uncomfortable things to another country without labor or safety protections. Consumers need to accept that if they want nice things those things come with some amount of cost to the environment and level of risk. The government needs to work with corporations to find the safest _practical_ mitigation that doesn't bankrupt them. If that's done correctly you will actually avoid accidents like this because everyone is working together on the same page.

daedrdev• 2 months ago

In California, this is absolutely not the case. Regulations are strict, chemical emissions are heavily restricted and proper disposal of chemicals via specialized companies at great expense. Chemical companies have no need of formulating new versions because everything causes cancer under prop 65. They absolutely have numerous permits for chemicals, your claim that they don't denies reality.

This case probably fell through the cracks, was grandfathered in due to military importance, or is a symptom of the utter lack of industrial knowhow plaguing modern US manufacturing because much US manufacturing is legacy work from decades ago with little ability to modernize, at a plant that likely existing long before the nearby housing.

protocolture4• 2 months ago

Because the US chemical industry has been effectively unregulated for a century and can do whatever it pleases.

And yet I bet if I look there's actually a ton of regulation.

Chemical A is found to be cancerous

Chemical A is assumed to be cancerous by the state of California, you mean?

hfcjy65• 2 months ago

But then no one would build Jurassic Park. And man, I want to pet Raptors and take selfies with T-Rex you know. Its a conundrum.

CalRobert2• 2 months ago

Hell, it’s still amazing there was so little fallout after Bhopal.

joxdosba2• 2 months ago

Complaining about the Chevy Cruze like that is hilarious. Did you go out of your way to pick up a particularly harmless example?

What about all the other cars that kill significantly more people by design? Like, I don’t know, any SUV or pickup truck? In that context, picking on the rather innocent Cruze seems a bit obtuse.

stymaar• 2 months ago

Chemical A is found to be cancerous, so they rework it slightly, enough to call it a new chemical even though it's nearly the exact same thing, but we're right back to square one on it "not being hazardous."

That's exactly the story of Bisphenol A: once banned it just got replaced by variants of unproved (but likely even higher) toxicity.

cratermoon• 2 months ago

Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient.

It's cheaper.

ErroneousBosh• 2 months ago

What the...?!

I was literally just this afternoon telling someone about TIWWW and posting them some favourites.

h335ian• 2 months ago

By the miraculous grace of God, a crack allowed pressure to bleed & enabled our engine company to prevent thermal runaway. A BLEVE was the projected outcome, a firefighters worst nightmare - see the Kingman BLEVE - https://www.cityofkingman.gov/government/departments-a-h/fir...

decimalenough• 2 months ago

BLEVE = Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion

_whiteCaps_• 2 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGWmONHipVo

MythBusters have a good BLEVE episode. Apparently Adam Savage's favourite explosion.

xoxxala• 2 months ago

My parents are retired fire-fighters. They had an American pygmy goat named Bleve. Those goats commonly have very rotund stomachs[1] that look like they are about to explode.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:American_Pygmy_G...

bayarearefugee• 2 months ago

[flagged]

idiotsecant• 2 months ago

It's ok to just treat it like a thing people say. When people say 'bless you' I don't explain to them that sneezing doesn't actually expel my soul from my body.

itishappy4• 2 months ago

Or He felt we needed a small reminder of what we're capable of if not careful!

pfdietz4• 2 months ago

That's the cool thing about the God Theory: any events can be explained by it.

thom_nic• 2 months ago

A leak was detected in one of the fittings and an attempt was made to correct it by striking the fitting with a large wrench.

throwaway894345• 2 months ago

https://darwinawards.com/

bagels2• 2 months ago

[flagged]

Dumblydorr• 2 months ago

Why bring God into the discussion? Do you think he’s monitoring our lives actively? Why is he a he? Does God have male genitalia?

Biganon• 2 months ago

Ughhh don't be this guy, please...

Waterluvian2• 2 months ago

I had wondered the whole time why they didn’t just pierce it with an AM rifle. Would that not have been better than a random partial failure via a crack?

Genuinely open question. I don’t know anything about stuff.

ac29• 2 months ago

The spark could have caused an explosion.

cogogo2• 2 months ago

I read that was the primary concern and wondered about drilling/piercing techniques that could avoid a spark. Spraying water sounds like the dumbest one but some kind of mud applied or something. CNC machines don’t seem to be light shows but i know very little.

ajb• 2 months ago

Not a direct answer, but there is a standard code for what actions emergency services should take, and the code[1] for this stuff is 3YE, which means "Use foam or dry agent, substance reacts violently/is explosive, BA [breathing apparatus] use is essential, evacuate vicinity, contain spill." So there must be some reason not to let the stuff out.

[1] This is the hazchem code. I think the US uses a different system. A list is here: https://www.ricardo.com/media/radn55jg/dangerous-goods-emerg...

PaulDavisThe1st2• 2 months ago

The US uses the Emergency Response Guide or ERG, which similarly lists more or less all hazardous materials and suggests appropriate responses.

Full document is here: https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/sites/phmsa.dot.gov/files/2024-04/...

Relevant guide is 129, which is on PDF page 189.

---------

SPILL OR LEAK

• ELIMINATE all ignition sources (no smoking, flares, sparks or flames) from immediate area.

• All equipment used when handling the product must be grounded.

• Do not touch or walk through spilled material. • Stop leak if you can do it without risk. • Prevent entry into waterways, sewers, basements or confined areas.

• A vapor-suppressing foam may be used to reduce vapors.

• Absorb or cover with dry earth, sand or other non-combustible material and transfer to containers.

• Use clean, non-sparking tools to collect absorbed material.

Large Spill

• Dike far ahead of liquid spill for later disposal.

• Water spray may reduce vapor, but may not prevent ignition in closed spaces.

---------

kotaKat• 2 months ago

I guess that begs the next point though - the high pressure system inside would want to violently vent out to the low pressure system outside through the relatively tiny hole.

Delta P... when it's got you... it's got you.

left-struck• 2 months ago

If you shoot and pierce a vessel that is pressurised, especially if it’s near its pressure limit anyway, it will explode. Even if it’s just filled with an inert gas.

Actually even just making a hole by any means will significantly increase the chances of an explosion. This because the smallest crack can start a chain reaction where the material at the leading edge of the crack is bearing too much stress and the bonds break which then passes the stress on to the material straight after that. This all happens very quickly and can even accelerate as the hole grows bigger and gas starts moving.

It’s very lucky that the crack that formed didn’t propagate like that. It could be for many reasons though, like the crack front could have run into thicker material or a weld line or something like that and if luckily stopped the crack.

Gibbon1• 2 months ago

Cracks in pressure vessels can propagate faster then the speed of sound. Which means your pressure vessel goes to flinders before any pressure is relieved.

aqme28• 2 months ago

Wait... how could that have helped? It's a toxic material under pressure so why would we want to vent it further?

KennyBlanken2• 2 months ago

The immediate danger seems to abated, fortunately,

The "it will explode leveling a couple city blocks" danger seems to be abated, but instead it's spraying an insanely toxic chemical out into the open, which will likely have health repercussions for residents for decades?

Thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals don't just disappear.

gus_massa2• 2 months ago

It probably polymerized completely and it's a giant block of nasty looking solid plastic, that perhaps can be lifted with a crane (with some support, in case it has cracks or something).

In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe. (I think it was use for windshields for planes, so once polymerized it was probably safe to touch at least.)

In this case it was an uncontrolled reaction so I'm not sure if someone knows the exact current composition of the goo, so I strongly recommend to avoid licking it.

amluto5• 2 months ago

In some plastics the monomer is toxic, but the polymerized form is safe.

This is common. Isocyanates are a common example — isocyanate monomers are nasty, and the very light ones are very nasty. They’re used to make polyurethane, polyurea and such, which are quite nontoxic in polymerized form.

In applications where the unreacted isocyanates are used by anyone other than professionals (e.g. two component varnishes), the manufacturer may go out of their way to use more expensive but less toxic variants.

compass_copium• 2 months ago

Correct, PMMA is completely harmless. MMA is an incredibly common adhesive, and is in probably a dozen things in the room you are sitting in in its polymerized form.

amluto5• 2 months ago

insanely toxic

Some quick searching suggests that it’s toxic but not even close to “insanely toxic”. And it’s not persistent in the environment.

If you want a genuinely nasty chemical, check out methyl isocyanate, which is some two orders of magnitude more acutely toxic.

bell-cot• 2 months ago

I'll see your CH3NCO, and raise (CH3)2Hg -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethylmercury#Safety

- considerably more deadlier, and the mercury an element - so no clever chemical reactions can break it down into innocuous CO2, H2O, and N2.

DannyBee2• 2 months ago

MMA is not very toxic. It has the same LD50 as vitamin C. Table salt and baking soda are twice as toxic as MMA, for example.

Additionally it is almost certainly not in vapor form at 100 degrees. In sunlight it will also polymerize to a solid pretty quickly.

As such you'd practically have to drink it inside to hit the ld50.

The explosion would be much worse than a release of liquid or vapor based MMA during the day, and here it almost certainly solidified at this point

amluto5• 2 months ago

MMA can apparently cause some issues that are more subtle than death. I would MUCH rather eat 1g of vitamin C than 1g of MMA.

Also, vitamin C is not volatile, so there is no risk of inhaling it as a gas.

__david__2• 2 months ago

On the plus side, it's a chemical that was discovered more than a century ago so scientists have accumulated a lot of knowledge about it. So far no studies were able to link it to cancer. It also doesn't significantly build up in the body over time (like heavy metals do). It's 3x heavier than air so it shouldn't spread too far away. The main issue is they want to try to keep it from getting into storm drains or into the ground water.

I've heard from others that it's readily absorbed by water. That's bad in the ground water case, but it seems it might be a positive when trying to clean up a (contained) spill.

It appears to me to have a relatively high lethal dosage (my back of the napkin calculations are saying a 200 pound human would have to orally ingest almost a liter of it to reach the LD50 dosage--but again don't quote me on that number because I am not an expert and could have very easily messed up the math or the concept of a lethal dose).

So, while I agree there might be unknown long term issues, it does appear to be a relatively low probability of that since it seems to be on the less pernicious side.

fc417fc8026• 2 months ago

You've got the right idea with the LD50 but the catch is that if it ignites it produces things that are acutely toxic in relatively small quantities.

Vaslo• 2 months ago

Opened a small round bottom flask of this when I worked in the lab. Closed it immediately when I felt burning in my eyes as did others around me.

It’s toxic but not insanely toxic. Isocyanates, phosgene, gaseous cyanides - now those are insanely toxic

copypaper• 2 months ago

What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation. If we ever get hit by an earthquake or other larger disaster, it's safe to assume we're all on our own.

Also, as someone affected by this, it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?

__david__2• 2 months ago

What a disaster and complete failure on the local government in the way they handled this situation.

Can you expand on that? It seems like there wasn't a lot they could do once the tank started leaking.

Abh1Works• 2 months ago

vague post

_carbyau_• 2 months ago

it has been extremely frustrating getting updates via xitter. Do we really have no other options?

It is amazing how the modern world has a webpage for every organisation but they can't bloody update it usefully and use a random platform (Xitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, facebook) instead.

itishappy4• 2 months ago

Here's a fascinating postmortem analysis of two similar incidents, Styrene and Butyl Acrylate:

https://iomosaic.com/docs/default-source/papers/polymerizati...

From fuzzfactor's comment with lots of other great info:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48252245

fuzzfactor2• 2 months ago

Now I'm thinking that a weak part of the tank gave way at one of the lesser welds on this non-pressure vessel, quite early and in the top part of the tank well above the liquid level. When you stand on top of a big tank, a lot of them do flex quite a bit. Physical pressure must have increased somehow in a way that could not be relieved without rupture.

IIRC there was some report of a "gas leak" to begin with and that could very well have been it.

I can only imagine what it's like to be one of the shift operators down there on the pavement around the tanks and pipes on a daily basis, in their flame-retardant coveralls and hardhats. Based on my vivid experience working with similar operators as I took official samples from tanks usually located in much bigger tank farms.

MMA smells so sharp that any leakage from a valve or pipe fitting gets attention much more so than other flammable liquids, for instance things like paint removers, alcohol or acetone which smell very faint by comparison. I expect that the workers had gotten accustomed to a fairly clean air environment without serious toxicity levels, and would estimate that a leak of about 1 drop per minute from a flange would be easily identified and fixed. Not only to keep the neighbors from complaining, but to keep the workers from gagging when they walk closer to that location.

If the first sign of trouble was physical tank bulging and/or suddenly stinking up the whole place with lots of MMA vapor (like from an upper tank rupture) when there is no sign of leakage on the ground, that pretty much qualifies as a "gas leak". Once the smell was no longer prominent, I would say that polymerization was well underway and there was not as much free monomer available to build up more pressure or even evaporate very much after that. If there's warm liquid MMA open to the atmosphere, you will smell it downwind.

It might be a stretch to say that "nature takes its course" when synthetic monomers spontaneously polymerize like this, but that's what some of them do best that sets them apart.

From what I understand, in the uninhibited pure monomer it doesn't take that many PPM of monomer molecules to become "activated" in some way before the chain reaction of them with remaining molecules eventually accelerates to completion. Which may be why such a low concentration of inhibitor works so well, but inhibitor must be well-dispersed within the liquid and there must be enough circulation to avoid local depletion of the inhibitor due to stagnant contact with as yet unidentified unexpected initiators. Not only should it be easy to get a random 1 liter sample from a tank (of such non-viscous material) at any time, the single sample should ideally be highly representative of the entire tank contents. Due to the way the liquid is handled in bulk going in & out of the tank, as well as any additional circulation to insure good mixing of incoming cargo, or after boosting inhibitor amounts when only a few carefully measured pounds or kilos of the concentrated inhibitor is dumped into the bulk monomer to keep it from going below spec.

The inhibitors have been selected to be very strong and effective at what they do so it doesn't require a high concentration, and the downstream processors can more easily overcome the inhibitor effect and produce plastics using different and milder polymerization initiator techniques when there is not an excess of inhibitor.

Once it gets polymerizing past that minuscule little inhibitor, from that point it's like there is no inhibitor at all. So there is some possibility that this is a fairly worst-case runaway polymerization event where the full amount of caution was rightfully warranted. Even though it would have to be considered fairly benign compared to a whole tank of the liquid monomer dispersing through the neighborhoods, or going up in a fireball, which is always a risk anyway :\

Under storage, it really is tremendous force that the inhibitor is holding back, considering how badly outnumbered it is by the 99.9% of everything else in the tank that wants to spontaneously react with itself otherwise. When the inhibitor is only about 20 PPM, which in percent is 0.0020%, in these cases percent by weight. IOW 20 lbs of MEHQ crystals dissolved in every million lbs of MMA liquid, or in metric 20 kilos of inhibitor for every million kilos of cargo.

Now usually the lowest inhibitor concentration will be at the chemical plant that produces the monomers, and it may go into bulk storage the same way when fresh material is moving through the system adequately. From there, vessels, rail cars and trailers often have different amounts of additional inhibitor added in order to boost levels according to purchase agreements of the different industrial consumers.

Often by contractors such as companies I have worked for who store the inhibitor concentrate as agents for the client, and can sample industrial tanks & test in the lab to routinely determine inhibitor concentration. Then carefully measure according to requirements and be the third party that certifies the new concentration after our field operator physically adds the additional dose to the tank.

For something like vessels and rail cars you just can't expect their cargo samples to accurately reflect a recently boosted inhibitor value, the small amount of inhibitor concentrate won't be adequately mixed with the rest of the bulk monomer before the ship leaves the dock or the train leaves the terminal. So it has to be certified by careful physical addition while being supported by good lab data to begin with. You expect lab readings to match the certificate after the ship gets overseas or the rail car gets across the country.

Now measuring low PPM is not always easy but you get better after a while.

Much better for me because I got to start doing it my own way as soon as I could, after first establishing as many of the predecessor techniques as possible for reference, but people still wanted more reliable results and so did I since the beginning. Ever since then, doing the continuous improvement thing for more decades than you normally get.

Things I will work with, repeatedly ;)

buildbot• 2 months ago

Meanwhile in Washington, an unknown number of people where killed today in a paper mill “white liquor” explosion today…: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/05/26/longview-chemical-exp...

dakolli• 2 months ago

And for what, $25.00 bucks an hour? We need to take back production.

photochemsyn• 2 months ago

Reminder that the US Chemical Safety Board does great investigations into these kinds of accidents. Here’s a famous one from 2007 involving methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl (a gasoline additive) at T2 Laboratories in Jacksonville Florida. The CSB has a long record of producing great investigative videos without any partisan or legal bias, as the one shown here demonstrates:

https://www.csb.gov/t2-laboratories-inc-reactive-chemical-ex...

This agency is the subject of a budget war between the current executive and Congress, with the former trying to cut its budget and the Congress just restoring its budget, so not sure if it will be doing a report on Garden Grove:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/congress-rescues-industr...

tardedmeme2• 2 months ago

I thought Trump defunded them last year? It was big news at the time.

pfdietz4• 2 months ago

I had thought that too, but the funding was kept there by Congress.

bigmattystyles• 2 months ago

Tangent but there's a great Sublime song titled `Garden Grove`. Looks like they made a modern video for it that presumably shows a lot of Garden Grove. Or it could be Long Beach, I don't know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSo_zj0UQw

parpfish• 2 months ago

i always suspected that chemistry was up to something, but never thought it'd be behind something like this.

GeorgeWoff25• 2 months ago

This reminds me of the old adage, every system is secure until someone actually tries to use it.

muyuu• 2 months ago

context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_Grove_chemical_leak

Schlagbohrer• 2 months ago

"I look forward to the eventual incident report for the root causes of this one - assuming that we do such things any more here in the #$%@! Golden Age in which we find ourselves - because that, too, will make things safer going forwards. One hopes."

If there's no after action report, we'll never get a good episode of Well There's Your Problem on this incident, and that would be a loss for both engineering and podcasting ;-(

khuey• 2 months ago

Given the disruption this has caused in Orange County I would expect to eventually get a slick US Chemical Safety Board video on it.

EvanAnderson• 2 months ago

I had to go look-- I thought the CSB got defunded and closed. Luckily it appears it did not (though not for lack of trying).

John Childgey's "Causality" podcast[0] covers stuff like this, and I'm sure he'll eventually cover it.

[0] https://engineered.network/causality/

trelane• 2 months ago

Fascinating! Only tangentially related: I've definitely heard of PMMA, and didn't realize it was plexiglass! It's used regularly in semiconductor fabrication. https://kayakuam.com/product/structsure/pmma-positive-resist...

(also waaaay down on the list of uses at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poly(methyl_methacrylate) but I thought that first link was clearer. Look for "In semiconductor research and industry, PMMA aids as a resist in the electron beam lithography process.")

felooboolooomba• 2 months ago

Being an armchair expert, I wondered if they couldn't have flown a quadcopter with a small drilling machine and drill a hole on the top to relive pressure?

humanpotato• 2 months ago

First, there's probably a pressure relief system already on the tank.

The problem is that is analogous to drilling a hole in a pressure cooker, it's either going to rupture the tank entirely, or blast the contents into the air.

Also curious where you would get a "quadcopter with a small drilling machine" with a couple hours' notice; even if you had one, it would be hard to maintain a position at one exact spot, and much of the lift energy would be expended in the torque reaction of the drill.

PaulHoule2• 2 months ago

I am seeing papers go by from Chinese researchers who are interested in things like using drones to do maintenance on sea platforms and they'd definitely be interested in attaching drills to drones and the like.

SoftTalker• 2 months ago

All process tanks I've seen have various cleanout hatches, drain valves, pressure relief blowoff valves... even your water heater has these. Not sure about this tank in particular and obviously there were no easy answers in this particular event, but hopefully lessons will be learned.

mvkel• 2 months ago

It seems like the issue wasn't the pressure so much, but the temperature. The contents were supposed to be stored at 50 degrees. The thermometer for the tank was reading 100 degrees, but nobody knew what the actual temperature was, because the thermometer's maximum reading was 100. So the challenge was to figure out how to cool things down (which would relieve the pressure in turn)

tkel• 2 months ago

I don't know about a hole, but the reason why the tank didn't rupture, is because a crack was discovered, which relieved the pressure. They got lucky.

vzqx• 2 months ago

"It’s unlikely that firefighters would consider creating a hole in the tank because of fears that could create a spark that might ignite the volatile and flammable gas."

Per https://apnews.com/article/california-chemical-tank-leak-c1f...

poooka• 2 months ago

Whenever I read anything by this guy I just think of George Creel and his Committee on Public Information. He's a throwback.

ck2• 2 months ago

Derek Lowe is always such a great read, one of the few good things I discovered during the pandemic

ykl• 2 months ago

Ha, from the title alone I was hoping for a Derek Lowe article, and it is!

That Methyl Methacrylate Tank

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