Ooooooh! Ahhhhhhh!
That’s the last time I hire Bruckheimer Bros. Shipping.
Gandalf’s really been upping his game over the last few centuries.
Oh, man, that reminded me of something that I actually witnessed a long time ago. I was working on a photo shoot at the set of The Untouchables and one of the semi trailers that was parked behind the sound stage caught on fire. The one that had all the gunpowder and blank ammo for the guns they used.
The fire lasted quite a while and about four times there were really big explosions as one of the kegs of powder exploded. Those explosions were big enough to be felt through the wall of the studio standing at least 20 feet from the wall.
At one point early in the fire the studio manager and a teamster raced into the cab of the truck during a lull and pulled the rig away from being so close to the studio. The whole thing was an amazing sight. I’m sure there were a lot of vintage guns lost in the blaze.
Keep in mind, folks, that one person died and nearly 30 were seriously injured in this event…
This reminds me of incidents like Enschede (2000) and the Lima Fireworks market disaster two years later.
That stuff is fucking dangerous…
I wonder what set it off? I imagine such things are packed and transported with exceptional care, especially compared to the stuff I get in the mail.
I wonder why they don’t all pop at the same time.
Because they are initiated by fire, instead of by a sympathetic detonation. The explosions are too weak and the ordinance too insensitive for the latter.
There will be investigation that will hopefully find out something. My guesses include broken package and spill out of the flash powder, with subsequent ignition by grinding or impact or static electricity (the stuff can be very sensitive to ignition these ways and took a lot of fingers during homemade manufacture). Or the vehicle itself may have gone up in flames, e.g. from bad brakes or tire rubbing against something, or an engine or electricity fault.
Also, PEPCON. That’s technically not fireworks but the ammonium perchlorate that went off there is a rocket propellant component so it may count as such if we stretch the definitions just a bit.
Do whatever you want, you will be hard pressed to out-awesome the PEPCON mishap. Ka-PEW!
That’s the cost attached to stored-energy anything. Doesn’t make the mishaps any less interesting.
First thing I thought of was Enschede but I just got back from there. I know someone who lost a house in the disaster.
Of course they still have a huge firework culture, there were small fireworks displays every couple of weeks or so, and the new year is insane.
There was the time 20 minutes worth of fireworks went off in 15 seconds (San Diego Bay):
This is just one barge, there were several others that went the same way at the same time.
This is a terrible video - I can’t get a sense of the scale, or attendant chaos or anything. It’s like telling me about this awesome forest, then showing pictures of leaves.
For fuck sake, it was a 193 vehicle crash with many injuries, one fatal. The fireworks was a sideshow. Interesting mishap? Yeah, the stored energy of moving vehicles tearing bodies up is just so cool.
That is a good explanation for the mechanism of igniting the vehicle’s load. Does not say, however, if the casualties were related to the fireworks or to the collisions.
A cool one, too.
Yes, few of this scale aren’t.
Yup. You get a range of interesting problematics involved. The amount of engineering that goes into the vehicle deformation zones is downright staggering, without even branching into the finite-element simulations and the crash tests.
And then there is the biomechanics of the actual injuries.
Cool is not a strong enough word.
I’m sure the suffering of the victims will be at least somewhat alleviated by knowing they brought a few bright moments of delight to a giddy sociopath.
I doubt it…
Not from the fireworks, though, right? (So not this event.) It was the 200-car pileup that triggered this fireworks show that killed someone.
You forgot to say you were concerned.
Now here’s what I’m wondering: how is it Fox just happened to have a camera crew right there, ready to shoot?
Sorry, I’m fucking concerned. I know people who were involved. Ass.
