BLEVEs Over TO!

These guys will probably need to update their website:

Sunrise Propane and it's employees take great pride in being able to deliver very competitively priced propane and industrial gases with exceptional service to all customers. Satisfied customers are the foundation upon which Sunrise Propane was built!

If you haven't read about it or seen it on TV yet, there were a number of large explosions at the Sunshine Propane facility in West Toronto this morning, sending huge fire-balls into the air, and forcing the evacuation of residences in a one mile wide radius from the site.

What the police worry about now are a number of propane tanks upon which "flames are impinging". They are hosing these down with cold water, hoping to keep the liquid inside from reaching the boiling point and causing a BLEVE, or "boiling liquid expanding vapour explosion". That would occur if the propane within one of these tanks breaches its container wall, and sends a huge cloud of steaming, flammable vapor into the air which itself then ignites. The result might look a bit like this:



Back in Langford, B.C., about 25 years ago, we dodged one of these things by a fairly narrow margin when a facility up the road from Belmont Highschool sprang a leak and a stream of liquid propane wound up flowing freely down Jacklin road. The two staff on site at the time, a couple of boneheads I went to highschool with, fled at the first sign of trouble. Eventually the fire department staunched the leak and nothing bad happened, but apparently there were vehicles driving up and down Jacklin and splashing through puddles of propane for an hour or so. Afterwards our local paper ran a graphic showing the area that could have been damaged had one of the propane tanks in the yard went off.

Comparisons were made to a small atom bomb, which is what many of the residences mentioned this morning.