Explosions Rock Texas Chemical Plant, Killing 3 - NYTimes.com
Had this explosion happened 8 minutes later I would have been directly under the blast sight. The above article didn't state just how big the blast was. Explosion experts from all over the world were flown in to determine just how big it was. Final conclusion 25,000lbs of tnt. Pretty big. It rattled windows in a town 45 miles away. It blew hundreds of windows out of houses 6-8 miles away. Moved walls in houses etc. Most of the cars in the parking lot were crushed like tin cans. The debris that got so many cut up people was transite. All the pump houses were made of the half inch thick corrugated asbestos cement mix material. It shatters and sends heavy pieces flying everywhere.
I was in a control room that was 2 stories high. It was protected by the building right next to it which absorbed the brunt of the blast. A huge vapor cloud of mostly butane several hundred feet in diameter was lit off by reserve boilers which were being started that day due to maintenance issues with the main boilers. We actually thought it was one of those old boilers which had blown up. When the blast went off the walls caved in then were sucked out again when the actual area the blast happened in sucked all the air back into the void left by the explosion. Kind of a double whammy.
The main area that had the 2-300 foot flames was surrounded by huge fire monitor stations. Being a member of the emergency fire crew because it was a weekend we went to try to aim streams on the raging flames but had no firewater pressure. The system backed by 5 million gallons of storage water had its main header in a supposed explosion proof bldg directly under the blast which was destroyed. So the 150lbs of pressure we had at the monitors was gone. Like a little kid pissing on a burning house.
When I went to the area I would have been in 8 minutes later I found a guy that i could not recognize. His eye was blown out hanging on his face. His ear torn off, his leg twisted and bent at 90 degrees the wrong way. He was alive but barely. 10 feet away under debris was one of my co worker friends his head half taken off by flying debris. I was a lucky guy that day.