I was working on an old Coats 4050A tire machine trying to bust some tires off of some rims and the “demounter” (basically a large, heavy metal prybar sort of thing) suddenly leapt free which, and I am not 100% clear on the physics here, seemed to suddenly transfer all of the force directly to my arm which then bent in a very unnatural manner. The customer, who had been idling nearby observing, immediately remarked “man, you just broke your arm!”.
Not an explosion per se but there was a Kaboom!, injuries resulting.
Lifetime mechanic here, the closest I have ever been to getting killed at work was a few months before I retired. I don’t remember if it was nitrogen or CO2. They have a pressure relief valve that blows off when they build too much pressure. Very common in hot weather. All the trucks I had worked on in the past had the blow off valve up high. I was under the truck adjust the breaks and it blew off violently, just as I was rolling out from the truck, I would say it missed me by two feet but the gas cloud still almost took me out, I was on the verge of passing out when I got out of it. My face would have turned to an instant ice cycle had I moved one second later.
I once worked for a movie company that did something similar. Anyway, I like to think that electricity is like snake venom, and perhaps you’ll build up a tolerance after a while.
His mistake was to drain it and rinse it; this would have left just enough fuel in the tank to provide enough vapour to form a nice explosive mixture.
My grandfather ran a mechanical engineering workshop in a rural area and he refused to do hotwork on fuel tanks which cost him business. Most workshops would fill tank with water, to overflowing, before welding on them. This is very safe unless - as has happened more than once - there is a little bit of fuel vapour trapped in a folded seam of the tank. It is of course the seams which tend to require re-welding.
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