‘Three boys have been reported to the Children’s Panel after an explosion and major fire at a chemical plant in Ayrshire, police have said.
Flames were spotted at the Nobel Enterprises factory in Stevenston at about 2000 BST on Saturday.
The fire involved highly-flammable nitrocellulose, which is used in inks and coatings. [..]
Anne Graham, also 56, said: “It was terrible. I thought the sun had come out, then my husband phoned and said ‘Do you see?’
“I couldn’t believe it. I stood on a nearby hill and could feel the heat on my face.” [..]
Strathclyde Police said about 1,500 to 1,700 tons of the nitrocellulose had been involved in the incident.’
‘A bus driver has described the harrowing seconds when he had to fight off a man who allegedly tried to steer his bus into oncoming traffic during this morning’s peak hour, and then allegedly said he had a bomb on board.
Greyhound bus driver Con Jansen, 47, from Chatswood, was four hours into his shift driving a Brisbane to Sydney charter bus with 26 people on board when a man suddenly tried to grab the large bus’s steering from him.
“I was driving along, the next minute I’ve got a guy grabbing the steering wheel,” said Mr Jansen, who had been driving the bus on Pennant Hills Road, near the corner of Beecroft Road, in Sydney’s north-west about 8.25am when the attack occurred.
“You’re just sitting down driving, you don’t expect anyone to jump on top of you.”‘
Using your bare hands and a bit of cavitation is enough to blow the bottoms out of glass bottles, apparently.
I’ll have to try this one day, tho I’m sure I’ll just end up slicing my hand open. 🙂
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‘As a hot-air balloon burst into flames and plummeted into an RV park, killing two people, a horrific scene of chaos and a raging inferno ensued, witnesses said.
“I saw the balloon coming down on the front of the trailer and when it hit, it exploded,” said Karen Ashby.
“There were flames and fire, people running. Everybody was in a panic. It was a shock. It was like a war zone here.”
Family members of the two victims were among those who stood powerless on the ground Friday evening, watching as the flaming balloon crashed directly into a trailer.’
‘There are few who would call postal delivery exciting. The reasons for this attitude are difficult to pin down, but it seems there is something inherent about the meticulous sorting and distribution of various pieces of paper that fails to capture the imagination. Nevertheless, over the last century there have been those who have wanted to change that: visionaries who looked beyond the truck and mailbag and imagined a means of delivering credit card bills and erotic magazines that would defy the heavens and shake the very Earth itself. Rarely has history seen a concept so grand, and so impractical, as Rocket Mail. [..]
This success was met with great excitement. While naysayers quibbled over such details as the wisdom of launching intercontinental cruise missiles to deliver postcards during the height of the Cold War, others were already mapping out a bright future for rocket mail. [..]’
‘Starting your lawn mower can be trouble enough.
But Danny Fendley, of Johns Creek, started more than just his mower Tuesday afternoon when he tugged at the pull cord.
The mower “exploded,” starting a fire that soon consumed Fendley’s home.
“It’s a goner,” said Fulton County Fire Lt. Gregory Chambers, at the scene of the blaze. “There’s not even one brick standing.” [..]
As Fendley struggled with the blaze, he said his wife tried to toss a can of gasoline out a window. She missed.
“Gas spilled everywhere,” he said.’
‘A Whitehall man escaped serious injury when his attempt to wipe out yellow jackets literally exploded in his face Monday afternoon.
[..] Sekol put a dried Christmas tree over the grate and poured gasoline over it, according to Benner. At least some of that gas ran down into the storm sewer.
When Sekol lit it, the combination of warm air temperature and confined space caused the liquid gasoline and fumes to explode. [..]
[His wife] found her husband sitting on the grass near the sewer grate, with his hair and eyebrows singed.
”I guess he learned a lesson,” she said.’
‘The Army Corps of Engineers, which accidentally dumped sand filled with old military ordnance on Surf City’s beach, now wants the town to help pay to remove it.
Local officials are angered by the suggestion that they should help foot the bill for a federal goof that already has cost the town an unknown amount of tourism business.
“If they’re talking about getting any money out of Surf City to pay for their mistakes, they can forget about it,” Mayor Leonard T. Connors told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Army Corps spokesman Khaalid Walls said local governments are routinely asked to help pay for projects.
“That’s protocol. All our projects are cost-shared,” Walls said.
The town had to close its beach in March after World War I-era ordnance, including fuses and other military hardware, started surfacing in sand pumped ashore during a $71 million beach replenishment project.’
At that age, I had more sense than to whack burning aerosol cans with wood.
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‘Two news helicopters covering a police chase on live television collided and crashed to the ground Friday, killing all four people on board in a plunge that viewers saw as a jumble of spinning, broken images.
Both helicopters went down in a park in central Phoenix and caught fire. No one on the ground was hurt.
TV viewers did not actually witness the accident because cameras aboard both aircraft were pointed at the ground. But they saw video from one of the helicopters break up and begin to spin before the station abruptly switched to the studio. [..]
Rick Gotchie, an air conditioning contractor, was working nearby when he noticed the helicopters overhead. He said they began circling closer as he continued watching, and one appeared to get too close to the other.’
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‘Following textbook instructions in performing chemical experiments at home may be conducive to safety, but the real thrills of research come from those experiments which you work out for yourself.
Certain chemicals just do not get along well together, and can misbehave in a manner which may cause acute embarrassment—and pain. To avoid accidents, keep the following list of chemical tricksters in mind whenever you venture into free-lance experimenting. [..]’
This actually happened at the university I used to go to. Our lecturers would occasionally tell us stories about stupid experiments that don’t end well.
This was always my favourite. 🙂
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‘A couple guys paddle out on a lake and shoot at a flaming propane tank. They were expecting an explosion and they got much more.’
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..and zinc and salt and ammonium nitrate.
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‘The rotting cadaver of a dead whale was floating in a west coast fjord on Wednesday, sending a foul odor over the area while officials worried it could explode at any time.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it an explosion, but it can be like an enormous fart,” said Tore Haug of the Norwegian Marine Research Institute in Bergen.
He warned emergency crews trying to tow the cadaver out of the fjord that gases built up in the dead whale’s stomach could cause a blowout.
“It would be quite unpleasant if the stomach blows up,” Haug told web site bt.no. “It’s not very nice to have rotten whale parts showering over you.”‘
‘Volcanic activity on the ‘bald mountain’ towering over St Pierre, Martinique, was usually so inconsequential that no one took seriously the fresh steaming vent-holes and earth tremors during April, 1902. By early May, however, ash began to rain down continuously, and the nauseating stench of sulphur filled the air. Their homes on the mountainside made uninhabitable, more than 100 fer-de-lance snakes slithered down and invaded the mulatto quarter of St Pierre. The 6-ft long serpents killed 50 people and innumerable animals before they were finally destroyed by the town’s giant street cats. But the annihilation had only begun. On May 5, a landslide of boiling mud spilled into the sea, followed by a tsunami that killed hundreds and, three days later, May 8, Mt Pelee finally exploded, sending a murderous avalanche of white-hot lava straight toward the town. Within three minutes St Pierre was completely obliterated. Of its 30,000 population, there were only two survivors.’
‘Stolen gunpowder went up with a bang when a teenager flicked cigarette ash near the open bottle, according to the Terrebonne Parish Sheriff’s Office.
Alex Joshua Horn and Johnathan Anthony Porche, both 19 and from Bayou Black, remained in jail Wednesday on charges of shoplifting and possessing or making a bomb. Both were arrested Sunday evening.
Wal-Mart workers had called the sheriff’s office that evening, saying three teenagers had been asking about gunpowder and PVC pipe.
About 8 p.m. Sunday, deputies were called to a house in Bayou Black, where they found damage from an explosion in the kitchen and dining room. They also found Horn, a resident of the house, and Porche, who lives a block away.’
‘Two people are expected to be charged Wednesday in connection with the bizarre 2003 case in which a pizza deliveryman died after a collar bomb attached to him exploded, CNN has learned.
Brian Wells died August 28, 2003, in Erie, Pennsylvania, after he claimed gunmen grabbed him, locked the bomb around his neck and ordered him to rob a bank. Police detained him after the robbery, and the device exploded as he waited on the pavement. A bomb squad was en route to the scene but did not arrive in time.’
The Smoking Gun has more.
The trick, it seems, is not to use a home made mortar tube.
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‘A former Kashmiri rebel was wounded when a tiny detonator planted in a cigarette by suspected militants exploded when he lit it up in a police station, a newspaper report said on Thursday.
The small blast, the first of its kind in the revolt-torn Himalayan region, took place in a remote village of Doda district where Mohammad Rafiq had surrendered to police, the Daily Excelsior said.
Separatist militants fighting Indian rule in the disputed region since 1989 frequently target their former colleagues who surrender to the police or the army.
“The small detonator, planted inside the cigarette, exploded when Rafiq was smoking, causing him minor injuries. He has been hospitalised,” the newspaper quoted a senior police officer as saying.’
‘What the hell was that?’
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‘The explosion at Demag Riggers and Cranes in Williston on Tuesday that killed a worker was caused by powerful fireworks stored in a safe, Williston police said.
Anthony Boisvert, 20, was using a cutting torch Tuesday to open the industrial safe when it exploded. [..]
The safe had been in an abandoned shed in Winooski since at least the mid-1990s. The safe was locked, the owner of the safe didn’t know the combination and didn’t know what was in it, Dimmick said.’
‘Authorities are hoping witness at a party Saturday night on the Western Slope will help with information on an oil tank explosion that killed two teenagers. [..]
Several in the group then moved the party to a near by oil pump. Authorities say 17-year- old Samuel Hedemark and 19-year-old Christopher Fuller climbed on top of a large, 20-foot tall oil storage tank and began to jump up and down.
The tank exploded, killing the teens and throwing their bodies 150 yards.
“Once they got up on the tank they were jumping up and down which was causing it to release vapors from the tank through a release valve on top of tank. At some point that tank exploded,” said Joos.’
Also with explosions.
This poor girl is scared out of her mind. 🙂
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‘A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.
Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS station KPIX-TV in San Francisco that military leaders had considered, and then subsequently rejected, building the so-called gay bomb. [..]
As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, “One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”
The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.’
‘About 26,000 people are killed every year by the 100 million land mines believed to be scattered around the world. [..]
Removing mines and making them safe is relatively easy. Detecting them is difficult and risky. Conventional methods, using electronic mine detectors, heavy machines, sniffer dogs, or gentle probes into the ground using a sharp object, are time-consuming, costly — and dangerous. Sometimes, those searching for mines become victims themselves.
Now, a Danish company called Aresa Biodetection believes it has found a cheaper and safer method to find land mines by using a plant that changes color when it detects explosives in the soil. It has conducted tests using a genetically modified thale cress plant. The thale cress family includes the cress plant used often in salads and also the weeds that grow in sidewalk cracks.’
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‘An alleged plot to blow up fuel tanks and pipelines at New York’s JFK airport had little chance of success, according to safety experts, who have questioned whether the plot ever posed a real threat.
US authorities said Saturday they had averted an attack that could have resulted in “unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction,” and charged four alleged Islamic radicals with conspiracy to cause an explosion at the airport.
But according to the experts, it would have been next to impossible to cause an explosion in the jet fuel tanks and pipeline. Furthermore, the plotters seem to have lacked the explosives and financial backing to carry out the attack.
John Goglia, a former member of National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the plot had ever been carried out, it would likely have sparked a fire but little else, and certainly not the mass carnage authorities described.’
Followup to JFK plotters courted backing for plot in Caribbean, South America.
