And this one was by far the worst. I’ve been in Virginia this weekend, and just about 20 minutes ago, while watching WWTBAM with my mom, there was a HUGE explosion. At first I thought something had hit the house, the whole building shook. I went outside to see what it was, but saw nothing. The other neighbors started coming out, too, and then we saw a mushroom cloud, which looked like it was coming from the foundry a little down the road.
Don’t really know just what happened yet, a neighbor has driven down there to check it out. I’m afraid a lot of people could be hurt or killed in this one.
Well, I know a little more about it now. There’s a foundry less than a half mile from the house here, they make automobile parts there. There’s been some concern about their safety measures there for a while, one man was crushed in a press there a while back, amazingly, he survived.
Anyway, tonight, apparently, there was a natural gas explosion there. It was huge, people 15 miles away heard it, the force of it knocked ceiling tiles out in some of the houses around here. Ambulances have been, and still are, coming in and out of there constantly.
I haven’t heard any official reports yet about injuries or fatalities, but I don’t see how it can possibly be good. This is a pretty small city, it’s going be a rough time for a lot of people around here.
I found this article about the explosion:
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGIOB9OSH5C.html
Three missing and seven injured.
Cabbage,
Bad things come in threes, so hopefully this is it. I’m starting to worry about you!
Zette
“If I had to live your life, I’d be begging to have someone pop out both my eyes. Just in case I came across a mirror.” - android209 (in the Pit)
Zettecity
Voted “Most Empathetic”- can you believe that?
Thanks, Zette! Hopefully this will be the end of it. A friend of mine works there, I don’t know if he was working last night or not, but hopefully I’ll hear something soon.
Dunno if this qualifies as a close call, but last night at 6 pm, a Southwest Airlines jet overshot the runway at Burbank Airport, which is just a mile or two from this apartment. We get their noise pollution all the time, but when this particular plane slithered off the landing strip and crushed a car on Hollywood way, we didn’t hear anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Everytime I hear a jet engine overhead, I wonder if this is going to be the one that makes an “unscheduled landing”, and this was almost that. Fortunately, there were no fatalities. Crummy as their service is, Southwest has never had a fatality. (I found that out from the “Plane Crash Info” site someone posted a link to.)
Yeah, I’m glad to hear there were no fatalities in the jet accident.
None of my friends were involved, but there are most likely three dead in the Virginia explosion.
The thing that pisses me off, is that the foundry has a history of safety violations. I believe they have the dubious distinction of being #1 in Virginia in OSHA violations over the past year.
In fact, there had been rumors of a natural gas buildup in the building for quite a while. Employees complained they could smell natural gas in the place. Nothing was done, and because of that, this explosion was most likely inevitable.