3:52 pm 20 years ago today

[Les Paul]

I was in the control room for the boiler/power generation section of the plant I work at. The day before we'd had a burner tilt malfunction and it had directed the fire box outside of the boiler. Imagine a flame about a foot in diameter cutting through everything in its path for 30 feet. One giant torch melting basically boiler structure. I was making my rounds and discovered it. I ran into the control and explained the situation. We called all the other units and informed them of the crash shutdown about to occur. That was Friday the 13th a bad omen to say the least.

The next day while bringing up some smaller antique boilers, 5 of them, to replace the one we had shut down, we kept hearing safties lifting on those boilers. Very spooky when 600lbs of steam suddenly vents to the atmosphere. At 3:52 we heard a loud explosion. We assumed one of those old boilers had blown up. We looked at our control panels and nothing was amiss. Then 8 seconds later the big one. The first explosion was a 4 inch line in an adjacent unit blowing apart at an elbow spewing pure butane at over 700psi straight toward those old boilers. A 200 foot diameter vapor cloud formed directly over the boilers and an errant spark lit it off. The explosion was estimated to have the energy of 25,000lbs of TNT. To say it was catastrophic would be an understatement.

Our house was 9 miles from the plant. It blew open a solid wood door going from our garage to the kitchen. My wife and daughter thought there had been a nuclear accident at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo. She looked out the window and saw flames shooting 200 feet in the air above our plant. The explosion was heard over 45 miles away, it broke most of the windows on mainstreet downtown which is about 7 miles from the plant.

All communications to the outside world had been severed. Except for 1. In our generator building next to our control room there was another phone line owned by a contractor. I called my wife and told her I was ok but the plant had been leveled and there were raging fires. All of our emergency radios were out so we had no way to communicate to try and coordinate the emergency fire crew. Fires would burn for 2 days before they died out. Luckily being a Saturday there were only about 60-70 people instead of the usual 400+.

Our 35mw generator had not automatically severed itself from the power grid like it was supposed to and had in fact become a motor. It was speeding up and we didn't have an ounce of steam going to it. When those things motorize and come apart they make a hole about 200 ft deep. We got our bunker gear on and made our way over mounds and mounds of debris leading to the fire monitors aimed at the unit where the flames were particuarily bad. The water lines leading to the monitors had been severed and we had no pressure. At that time after 20 or so minutes an order to abandon the plant was given. We'd found 2 guys that didn't make it and they would find another one that night. All friends and good guys. Before we abandoned the plant we thew an emergency switch that finally severed us from the power grid and our generator wound down.

They rebuilt the plant and now 20 years later the technology being as old as it is and with a new plant in China coming on line the plant will shut down within 2 years. I'll make it out with full retirement. I think of the 60-70 guys that were there that day there are only 3 or 4 of us still working out there. My small tribute to those guys and a day I'll never forget.

[Rikao4]

Damm..lucky doesn't seem to cover it.
Rika

[rammstein]

How did you not end up deaf? I mean, were you below it or something?

Are there any pics of this?

Thats quite an adventure you had there!

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Wow, no kidding - great story and even better to hear you got out of that okay.

Power generation is inherently dangerous - and something most people take for granted. Thanks for the good work you guys do and stay safe!

[Hugh R]

Wow, sounds like you were very lucky. When the safties started popping the next day on the antique boilers, no one thought to turn down the heat?

[Les Paul]

The old boilers were used once a year during turnarounds on the big boilers. They should have been scrapped and condemned. As it was the only way to set the safties is to get the pressure up to 600 and see if it lifts there.

Since I was inside a control room I was spared the hearing loss. I'm pretty deaf anyway. The people that were outside mostly did have their eardrums burst. There were some guys that had earplugs in and had to have them surgically removed.

Had the explosion happened 8 minutes later I would have been getting readings in a lab directly below the blast. The building was about 1 foot high at 3:53. There was a toilet that I often used on the way to the lab. That would have sucked to had my pants down and been blown away. One of the guys that didn't make it was about 10 feet from that toilet. The top of his head was lopped off by flying debris. He was one of the funniest guys I ever knew. RIP.

I do have pictures somewhere. I was on a rescue crew that went in the next day to look for more bodies and snuck a camera in there. At that point even though they told us not to do it I didn't really care because I never dreamed they would rebuild the plant. It was over 18 months before the main parts of the plant came back on line.

They brought in several blast/explosion experts from over the world to estimate just how powerful the blast was. All the cars in the parking lot had their windows blown out and roofs caved in. I had just had my car repainted. The blast knocked buildings off their foundations 6 miles away. The explosion was heard 45 miles away. There was a pickup right under the blast that looked like it had been in one of those crushers.

One of the more outspoken and notorius operators there that day was quoted in the Sunday paper the next day that if it had happened on a Friday they would have been hauling bodies out with a front end loader. It was true, but the Company sure didn't like reading that.

As far as power plants being dangerous. Yea. We often get saftey advisories from other plants about accidents. In one there was a gasket that blew out on the main 1500 steam line. The steam blew directly into the control room par broiling 12 people. You never hear about that stuff on the news but it happens.

[stevepaa]

was this the Hoecchst Celanese Chemical Co. plant
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2DC143EF936A25752C1A9619482 60

[MRM]

Wow.

God bless you all.

[Les Paul]

Wow, that is it. Of course parts of the story are wrong but that is typical. I had old hs and college buddies I hadn't heard from in years calling after they saw the story on CNN. Not that they gave a particular rats ass if I had made it but there were some strange conversations there for a couple of days. It is amazing what the good old internet can dredge up. I saved all the papers from the next days Sunday papers and going back and reading them and the misinformation is a credit to the spin machines of a major corporation. Of course the company now downplays the entire thing because ultimately it was a management decision not to bring in nitrogen truck to purge the reactor that blew the pipe. What happened is our main reactors have butane a catalyst and 0% Oxygen. Heat it to 800F, pressure it to 700lbs and you get this amazing reaction that creates mostly Acetic acid and about 28 other weird and wicked acids. The reactors are 4 inches thick to control the chaos within. The line that blew was only 1/2 inch thick. Why put a line that thin on something so volatile? Anyway nitrogen is used to displace the oxygen which you don't want in your reaction.

So that particular units manager decided to try bring up that reactor without purging it with nitrogen which is always sop. It would save them 8k. They didn't have enough on site that day and would have had to wait another day to bring up the unit. What that story couldn't tell was that 1 of the operators in that unit would later commit suicide over the guilt he had. A management decision and yet a guy couldn't live with the outcome of that decision.

[ronin]

a riveting read!

about 18 years ago, I worked for a company that performed maintenace for oil refineries during their annual shutdowns. the work was quite interesting, but I kept instinctively pulling my head between my shoulders whenever I walked the grounds. with all the pipes and tanks hissing I never could get comfortable being on site and kept waiting for the impending explosion. one night, while standing on a cat cracker at the sixth-story level and looking over the vast expanse of what looked like a city of sky scrapers lit up in sodium lights, I mentioned to a co-worker "y'know, us humans are fukkin' nuts!" he laughed and nodded in agreement

a few years later, that specific plant finally had that explosion where several people (I think 3) were killed. I didn't regret not being there

[Les Paul]

There are 2 major refineries here in the panhandle of Texas. I think one is the largest inland refinery in the US. About every couple of years one of them has an explosion. They hire operators all the time. So for any of you adventerous types that need a really good job, don't mind shift work, and don't worry about getting blowed up apply there.

[David]

Glad to you hear you made it out that day.

It's amazing how lucky we get sometimes. A couple years ago at one of the power plants in Houston, a 40 foot piece of 30" diameter cold reheat line tore loose and shot about 300 yards over the admin building and into a parking lot. The only causalty was a pickup truck. It was lunch time and a tropical storm was on the way so many jobs were shut down. A few yards shorter and it would have torn through the admin building .

[ronin]

interesting how sometimes only a few yards can make the difference between total disaster and a funny story. good anecdote

[rouxroux]

Wow! That had to be surreal seeing all of that happen! I can remember our house shaking whenever they were test-firing the Saturn V's back in the 60's, I can't imagine the power of an explosion like at that plant!

[sammyg2]

I've spent 25 of the last 27 years working in an oil refinery and lived through 3 large explosions. Scary doesn't cover it. Nightmares for six months is closer.

Of all the things in a refinery that can blow up, the boilers and heaters are about the only thing that still spook me.

[Les Paul]

Our boiler structure is over 120 feet high. I climbed to the highest point where I could see just how bad it was. I had also carried my radio thinking that maybe I could get some kind of reception since the emergency radio was not working due to the fact that something was keying it somewhere and there were no backup channels. What I saw was pretty scary. There was debris extending out from the plant for miles. They later found heavy transite over 4 miles away. Cars on the highway over a mile away were blown off the road. The lawsuits that were settled in the ensuing years was mind boggling. Anyway that place will be gone in several years as if nothing ever happened there.

[Normy]

I worked as a janitor in the coal-fired powerplants of Detroit Edison in the summers of 1984 and 1985. The following summer, a "tube leak" occured, and two employees of my company were hospitalized. The "tube leak" was basically a steam explosion from a pressurized line; they spent 6 weeks in the hospital.

Detroit Edison does good maintenance in my opinion, but I still felt safer working for the landscaping company that cut the grass outside the plant, and that's who I worked for in 1986.

Electrical generating stations have tube leaks and explosions all the time. You just don't hear about it is all, since they are about as newsworthy as a garbage truck breaking down. Still, I'd rather brave traffic driving to the airport than stand next to a two-foot wide tube with 1100 degree steam at 1700 psi moving through at nearly supersonic velocities.

[onewhippedpuppy]

Great read, and scary stuff. Sounds like another case of sacrificing safety to save a buck.

[KFC911]

Scary stuff...thanks for sharing and glad you made it through OK!

[sammyg2]

I worked at an edison plant in oxnard for a few months in the 80's, everyone carried cut off broomsticks hanging from their belt loops.
I asked why, they said their high pressure steam was just a tad over 4000 psi and if they had a leak they wouldn't be able to see it or determine where it was coming from because ot would be so loud.
They were instructed to use the broom stick to find a safe way out. Put it between your toes and slowly raise it up in front of you over your head. if nothing happens, take another step. If it gets suddenly cut in half, turn around.