My Mom and Dad and I went railfanning in Athens, Tx on Mothers Day and shot some pics of what we thought was an abandoned warehouse right on a spur on the old Cotton Belt (now UP) line....imagining what might have been stored here in the day...
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....turns out it was full of several tons of ammonium nitrate ala West, Tex.....burned to the ground. FD wisely just let it burn vs putting water on it which contributed to the destruction in West...glad Mom put the cig out as we were stomping around there....
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Wow, that's some bad stuff. One TV channel here last week did a story on chemicals being stored like this and labeled the whole Phoenix area a danger zone. It kind of fools you about what's being stored where, abandon structures may just look that way, just like this one.

That's why the company storing the stuff uses abandoned buildings. Imagine the fire insurance on a new building.

MountainMan Wrote:That's why the company storing the stuff uses abandoned buildings. Imagine the fire insurance on a new building.

I once thought I had a fairly large imagination :o
can't even begin to imagine just discussing fire insurance, on a new building, with the intention of storing those kinds of chemicals. hock:

Apparently the owner of the building made some improvements to the building after the explosions in West...He has done nothing wrong, everything was on the up and up, much to the dismay of the watchdogs trying to shut these facilities down....In Texas, there are at least 130 of these facilities all over the landscape, many of which you would never know what was inside....

scubadude Wrote:Apparently the owner of the building made some improvements to the building after the explosions in West...He has done nothing wrong, everything was on the up and up,

Not really. It blew up, remember? That means something in his safety equipment or protocols failed at a critical point.

MountainMan Wrote:

scubadude Wrote:Apparently the owner of the building made some improvements to the building after the explosions in West...He has done nothing wrong, everything was on the up and up,

Not really. It blew up, remember? That means something in his safety equipment or protocols failed at a critical point.

Not always, some buildings that have a high explosion danger are designed to blow out in a prescribed way to direct the force in a known direction. We had some security equipment at an air bag facility and that's the way all their buildings were built, and they had an unplanned demonstration one day. They lost one side of the building, but no one even got a scratch. Now I do agree, something in the process went badly, but the building did what it was designed to do.

The building did not blow up...it caught fire due to electrical issues...the investigation was closed and no foul play was determined....potential explosions were avoided primarily because water was not used to put the fire out. They evacuated the area and let it burn itself out..lessons learned from West..

BTW, the building was not abandoned and was up to codes. It has been storing this stuff for many years, and until laws are changed, will be used for many more years...

As I recall the ammonium nitrate didn't even burn completely, the structure did...

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