Probably not sabotage; a facility with the kind of violations indicated in the Tennessean article is primed for a serious accident.
Stranger
It requires some serious safety precautions at an explosives plant to have a serious incident that isn’t as dramatic as this one.
Well, if there were appropriate monitoring, physical separation of hazardous operations, and energetic materials properly segregated in storage there shouldn’t be an opportunity for a mass detonation or immolation as this appeared to be. Any facility where there was a potential for this kind of ‘incident’ shouldn’t have had 18 or more people in it, and frankly if there were operations that required the handling of that much raw, easily initiated energetic material in sufficient proximity to cause a sympathetic detonation or violent conflagration it should have been a remote operation. So, this was probably not a situation where someone made just a single mistake but a compounding of safety lapses, lack of controls, and trying to process too much materials or products in too small of an area without consideration for the potential hazard.
Stranger
When the heat is on to produce more, and turn over the stock quickly, sometimes practises which would not be tolerated in peacetime creep in.
a side note: calling claymore mines “solutions” in their blurb is disquieting.
If you stop and think about that for a minute, you would realize that a dollar a shot for cheap corn mash (sells for less than ten bucks a quart now, was around five bucks last year - making it yourself is cheaper) means either that nobody else in the county has access to corn and a big pot, or that the maker is very skilled and the product is well worth the money. (a quart is 32 ounces, a shot glass usually holds 1.25 to 1.5 ounces)
There were no survivors.
https://www.newser.com/story/376699/18-feared-dead-in-tennessee-plant-blast.html
Bucks snort.
I hear that sound in the dark maybe a hundred feet occasionally when I sit outside at night.
May I ask a question which you may not be allowed to answer in a public forum ?
Is the loss of this factory a big problem for national security?
Does the US military have enough other sources of explody-stuff?
I don’t think the loss of this relatively small facility compromises the ability of the United States to produce ordnance but in general people really don’t want propellant and explosives manufacturers nearby, not only because of the potential for fire and explosion but also due to the tendency for their constituents to leak into the nearby soil and water table. California, for instance, used to be host to three manufacturers of large solid propellant motors, all of which have either exited the business or moved to states that are notably lax about environmental regulation.
It is no secret that there are substantial issues with defense-related critical supply chains as outlined in DoD report “Securing Defense-Critical Supply Chains: An action plan developed in response to President Biden’s Executive Order 14017” which were a consequence of the drawdown and consolidation of defense industries in the post-Cold War environment. In general, producing munitions and ordnance has also become far more expensive, both due to environmental and occupational safety requirements, and because post-Vietnam War (and the ‘Secret Wars’ in Laos and Cambodia) there just hasn’t been the same volume of energetic materials produced for the military.
NPR: “Slow manufacturing and price gouging threaten the new U.S. military arms race”
The Cold War that followed kept U.S. weapons factories humming but when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, that arms race all but ended.
It was time for a “peace dividend” that would allow America to shift more of its vast economic firepower from guns to butter. The deputy secretary of Defense at the time, William Perry, called a meeting to break the news to the defense industry. It became known as “The Last Supper.”
He (Perry) told them that there was not going to be enough business to keep them all going, that they would need to consolidate," Cancian recounts. “So, industry listened and consolidated, and as a result was able to weather the transition to a post-Cold War environment. But it squeezed out a lot of capacity.”
Dozens of defense contractors collapsed post the Cold War, shedding about a third of U.S. military arms production capacity.
It made perfect sense at the time but times have changed. Cancian says the country has entered a new era of potential wars with Russia and China. And, he says, the U.S. is not ready.
Stranger
I haven’t heard a single word about this on TV news. How is this possible???
Stranger
A similar consolidation followed the Great War, with most of the British firms joining Explosive Trades Limited, which soon renamed itself Nobel Industries Ltd before merging into I.C.I.
Yeah, the pictures I first saw sort of suggested that no one inside would make it. Even someone outside, but close, would get blasted and clobbered with debris.
Everything these days is a solution or an application, in corporatese.
And hey, it’s a solution to your need to otherwise spend time and resources individually shooting the group of hostiles coming up that path.
How about Port Chicago?
Port Chicago Disaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Port Chicago disaster was a deadly munitions explosion of the ship SS E. A. Bryan on July 17, 1944, at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in Port Chicago, California, United States. Munitions being loaded onto a cargo vessel bound for the Pacific Theater of Operations detonated, killing 320 sailors and civilians and injuring at least 390 others.
Speed contests and safety training
In April 1944, when Captain Kinne assumed command of Port Chicago, the loading officers had been pushing to load the explosive cargoes quickly—10 short tons (9.1 t) per hatch per hour.[10] The desired level had been set by Captain Nelson Goss, Commander Mare Island Navy Yard, whose jurisdiction included Port Chicago Naval Magazine.[13] Most loading officers considered this goal too high.[10] On a chalkboard, Kinne tallied each crew’s average tonnage per hour.[12] The junior officers placed bets with each other in support of their own 100-man crews—called “divisions” at Port Chicago—and coaxed their crews to load more than the others. The enlisted men were aware of the bets and knew to slow down to a more reasonable pace whenever a senior officer appeared.[14] The average rate achieved at Port Chicago in the months leading up to July 1944 was 8.2 short tons (7.4 t) per hatch per hour—commercial stevedores at Mare Island performed only slightly better at 8.7 short tons (7.9 t) per hatch per hour.[10]
Estimate is that 0.012 kilotons exploded.
Is that the same as 12 tons ?
I vote yes. Seems easier to leave the decimal and the kilo off of that number.
Or you can say it was only 0.000012 megatons, which makes it seem even smaller.
Saying “12 tons” is a figure most anyone can easily understand, and helps you realize, that’s freaking huge.
The article itself actually says, “more than 24,000 pounds”.
So a little less than one (1) load of conventional bombs for a B-52 bomber.
(Bomb load capacity for a B-52 bomber is about 70,000 lbs, and assuming about half of this is high explosive, and the other half is bomb casings, etc.)
Or if you’re watching Masters of the Air with WWII B-17 bombers (6,000-lb bomb load capacity for long-range missions): about eight (8) bomb loads.
That would indeed be a lot of destruction for one bombing target.