interesting stories on China discussion

I finished a partnership report for a client yesterday, on the company that owns all the land and facilities around the explosion. Everything I wrote would now appear to be irrelevant.

I went to university in Tianjin (many years ago), and it's one of my favourite places. This explosion was a long way from the centre of town, in an industrial area. It's lucky it happened at night, or there could have been even more deaths.

 

Now clear that we are talking about warehouse explosions, not oil refinery. Boss of the facility is in custody (here things are done so). There are residential properties nearby -. In retrospect, this is not ideal.

 

I think it might be hard for people who aren't used to China to get their heads around the size of this explosion.

To give you a sense of scale, the buildings that you can see sticking up in front of the fireball look to be about 30-40 storeys tall. If that's the case, then it was an 60-80-storey-tall fireball.

 

One news report stated the first explosion was about 3 kilotons of TNT ( 3 kT), whilst the second (larger) explosion was about 20 kilotons of TNT. If true this Tianjin explosion is larger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb (12-18 kT). Fortunately the Tianjin explosion did much less damage than the Hiroshima bomb because the Tianjin explosion occurred at ground level. The damage is much. much greater when the explosion is about 1000-1500 meters above ground level.

I'll bet this Tianjin explosion will go into the record books as the "world's largest non-nuclear explosion."

 

It's so big that few possibilities exists for something other than large quantities of explosives. The other possibility is ammonia nitrate (fertilizer capable of become explosive). This was not a fire. This was an explosion measured as tons of TNT. It certainly was stuff way beyond just being "flammable".

 

Easy fellas. That was 3 and 20 tons, not kilotons.

Still and all 20 tons of TNT equivalent is not minor. Pressure wave broke windows over kilometer scales (not 10s km I think).

Flying debris appears to have caused the most injuries.

A very large number of firefighters were put on scene, apparently to limit the spread to other buildings etc. More than 1% of those guys are dead, which is pretty grim.

It made 'the list'
Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, among many others. Not a record breaker, but too much wetware nearby.

 

Night @61. Apparently there was a fire before (and triggering) the first.explosion. If in daytime, someone might have handled that.

Or become the first fatality. Can't be known. Hindsight is not always acute.

 

I stand corrected. One early news report stated "kilotons" rather than tons. But all of the current news reports describe the explosions as 3 tons and 20 tons. Still, that's a lot of explosive power!

-EB

 

I reckon that some here have played with calcium carbide either in their first or subsequent childhoods. Fun, as long as we are not talking about tons.

It seems a chemical storage/shipping firm (already named and shamed) ran a 'clinic' on how not to store incompatible chemicals on large scale. Some fire, and the brigade (now @2% dead) arrived. Water + Bangsite.

So, now there will inspections of chemical storage procedures all over the country. This has the potential to be more than a rearrangement of deck chairs.

Proximity to one or more apartment buildings was clearly illegal. Somebody may get a strongly worded letter about that.

 

gdanner highlights that media is often weak on technical terms. Kilotons is a good example. Personal favorite : epicenter. It does not mean what they think it means.

Volcanoes always spew. They never emit. Gets frustrating sometimes.

 

Quite a lot of sodium cyanide remains on site. Spills to be neutralized with hydrogen peroxide (which only sorta works, but I don't know of a better way). That still in barrels will get moved somewhere.

Smells like almonds. The 'particle masks' we see on reporters and the like are not effective. I was in a lab accident once where cyanide might have been present. Scary. The guys in suits with air tanks took samples for analysis. Fortunately the idiot grad student who caused it was inept enough to have done the reaction wrong. Me and the other victim thus did not need to have our blood chemistry reset (another scary). We did have etched corneas though, which (amazingly to me) recovered in about 2 days.

Tinajin explo even has a Toyota twist:

Toyota halts production near Tianjin blast site - BBC News

 

If half the population doesnt die from air pollution.

 

Rain forecast this (local) PM. If cyanide meets acid, aided by new water, then a problem. There will be 'silver iodide' shots upwind in attempt to limit local rain.

Problem now appears to be hundreds tons of sodium cyanide in uncontrolled settings. I'm trying without success to get the local wind vector! Something close to west would be ideal, but convective cells do as they choose..

Local evacuations have been on 3-km scale. Ten looks better to me. If you 'smell almonds', smear wet sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) on your damn useless face mask.

This is a poorly mapped situation with thousands of 'trained' folks being sent into the fray. I think the country is doing a C+ job at best, but not sure which other countries could get an A.

I hope we are done with fatalities here (fire responders finally about 3%), but things still look unresolved.

Fun question: To those here wanting the US EPA defunded (wither and die), who will save your butt if some chemical-storage facility nearby goes into 'oh shit' mode?

 

Bringin' it back home
15 treated at hospital after Terre Haute chemical leak

If it smells bad, then put on your low-end particle mask and smear it with baking soda/water paste.

I am gonna make Arm&Hammer rich by way of this low-traffic website.

 

Andyprius1, there will be a new paper in PLos ONE about CH air pollution mortality 1.6 million/yr. I have not got it yet. Is this something you want to talk about?

It's clear that everyone will die. Premature deaths here could be dominated by cars, breathing, cigarettes, or something else. Is this what you want to talk about?

Perhaps, premature deaths here could be the thing slowing CH global economic dominance. I don't think they're ready for it. I don't think they feel ready for it either. But, we can discuss.

 

Looks like NNW to NE for the next few days. Because Tangshan simply hasn't got the s--tty end of the stick often enough in the past. I wouldn't fancy being caught in the rain anywhere in the Jing-Jin-Ji area for the next couple of weeks, I must say.

Japan tends to do a less-than-completely-horrible job on this sort of thing. But I think that's where my list would end. I can't think of another country whose responses wouldn't be a catalogue of errors.

Move to FHoPol in 3...2...

 

I'm not going to get into much detail here (because, frankly, this is the sort of thing that my clients pay me the big bucks for).
But....

There is nothing that the Chinese government currently takes more seriously than the threat of air pollution. Much of the government - there are pockets of opposition - sees increased air pollution as the single biggest threat to political, social and economic stability and the single biggest threat to continued Party rule.

While Tochatihu lives in the paradise that is Yunnan, I spend more of my time that I'd like in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei-Shandong area, where pollution is horrific. But the relevant parts of the government are committed to addressing it, and these aren't the sort of half-arsed political "commitments" that you see in a democracy. They're preventing the import and use of poor-quality coal, banning the use of coal for water heating in urban areas in Northern China, and implementing a massive shift from coal to natural gas. So things are terrible now, but they will improve over the next three or four years.

 

In an attempt to revise our grim focus

What China makes: 10 things the country is big on [Infographic]

 

Not all may know that vacationing in China tends to be highly synchronized. This puts quite a strain on all domestic transport service. We are just now finishing up the largest one of the year. Some representative photos:

These Photos Show When Not To Visit China If You Don't Like Crowds

 

Just learned of this thing on local news

World's highest glass bridge to open in China - CNN.com

The news was that it reached its capacity (800) yesterday, perhaps for the first time?

CNN article rather underrates the Grand Canyon Skywalk at 21 meters. It is a cantilever and anchored very far into rocks.