…for a story. I don’t need to know how to destroy it—I need to know how to place one.
I need some kind of natural gas or propane facility that I can appropriately place in a small (2,000—4,000 people) mountain town in the present-day United States, about two or three blocks away from the center of downtown.
As you can guess, it’s going to get blowed up real good, and I’d like to make it as plausibly big as possible (a BLEVE would be tops). But the thing is, I don’t have any real knowledge or experience with town gas systems, so I don’t know what would be appropriate to squeeze in there.
I could probably just put in a propane tank storage depot, but I’m kind of hoping to use some kind of setup that actually ties into a town gas grid, if for no other reason than to help with ominous foreshadowing earlier in the story (I’d have someone go into a building in town, and find out that the gas has been shut off—something like that. Also so it doesn’t seem so much like I pulled a Deus Ex Boomina straight out of, er, nowhere).
Civil Engineers don’t put stuff like that where it would cause a lot of damage if something went wrong. Even propane facilities would not be permitted in too dense an area.
Fueling Stations are usually allowed because their tanks are underground.
Just use a tanker truck refilling a fueling station.
There have been actual cases where a gas main cracked and migrated downhill, pooling in a low. (Russia for one) The pool of invisible natural gas could extend for thousands of yards if not miles. A vehicle drives by and a spark, I suppose from the distributor, ignites the gas. Great big area, Kablooey!
I have just the thing for you. January 28, 1982, Centralia, Mo. Abackhoe damaged a regulator, causing gas at high pressure to go into low-pressure lines.
A few years back, a backhoe broke a long distance gas pipeline a half block away from us. This was a very high pressure line and the noise was tremendous and went on all day. A whole different beast from your local gas main. No fire thankfully. But it is weird having a helicopter shot of your neighborhood lead off the 5 o’clock news.
Such lines can be found passing thru quite remote areas. Perhaps your small town is right next to one. (Though I can’t imagine why they would dig one thru town.) Maybe throw in a pumping station or some such.
It is an old facility. Built in the 1890’s, it was bought by the town in the 1930’s when times were hard and the power & light company was in trouble. It has been owned by the town ever since. People sort of forgot about it. Nowadays it is used to generate power from natural (or better town) gas for the new hospital. What the hospital doesn’t need it sells, but the amount is so small nobody pays much mind to it.
A couple of missed state inspections, a couple of decades with deferred maintenance. A misplaced thingamajid and BOOM!
Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) ships and terminals can be a nice workaround. Not sure about the LNG terminal locations out west (Washington/Oregon), but ships pass by plenty of small towns along Puget Sound.
One goes boom, it’s a REALLY BIG BOOM. Will definitely do bad things to small towns (hell, BIG towns) nearby.
Not necessarily methane… is propane ever sent by pipeline? And I believe town gas–the gas used for lighting and stored in those 1890s-style ‘gasometer’ storage tanks–was a mixture that included gases other than methane.
This is where the mountain location actually helps out, as the town is located right next to a bridge over a fairly deep gorge, and “downtown” is pretty close the bridge’s entrance. Seem like a good enough excuse to have a gas line a little too close to a town?
So…if I put a regulator station in the town, connected to a long distance gas pipeline, would that be semi-plausible?
And, perhaps more importantly, is there any more explosive crap I could semi-realistically cram in to the same facility? Like storage tanks, or a tanker-filling setup, etc?
I don’t think anyone in their right mind would put it in the same facility, but I’m sure across the street you could have a farm supply store with plenty of fertilizer.
I have no idea how a hospital got in my head, but all hospitals make and handle liquid oxygen. The facility is small and automated. It is explosive enough for most purposes. After that you get to explosive trucks and trains passing through town at the wrong moment.
Yah. A few years ago, they were considering building an LNG receiving facility in Providence, Rhode Island - much “oh noes, terrorists could blow it up” ensued.
Richard Clark, the former counter-terror czar of “Against All Enemies” fame, conducted an extensive study of the LNG proposal. The report has interesting things to say about the security of LNG facilities and ships, and how easy (or not) they are to blow up. I’m actually not very fond of this report - it was actually written by a couple different teams of grad students, and it shows. (Some chapters claim there’s a high risk of tankers being hijacked, for example, while others dismiss this as unlikely. Different chapters make different claims about the vulnerability of tankers to RPGS, switch between metric and imperial units on a whim, etc.) But it’s certainly worth a read. The Providence Journal: Local News, Politics & Sports in Providence, RI
Yes. The ‘worst case scenario’ for LNG is quite interesting. First, you get the big temperature differential, which can cause things to explode and then you get the actual flamable gas. Of course, as the concentrations are very high initially, it’s actually difficult to get enough oxygen to get it to ignite without it being immediately smothered. And then once it’s sufficiently dilute to ignite, it tends to blow away in a hurry so you don’t get a fireball.
But, for cinematic purposes an LNG explosion would be pretty awesome.
Natural gas is sometimes stored by utilities in underground aquifers. Gas is purchased when prices are low and injected into storage and withdrawn on peak usage days . These things can hold 50 billion cubic feet of gas or more. If you wanted it he explosion to be a complete surprise you could say that there was a leak on a transmission line that ran near the town and it migrated into a nearby aquifer until it reached capacity and then somehow met an ignition source. That would provide an incredible explosion.
Well, lessee… If it’s running downhill, to the hospital, and the hospital is taking a delivery of liquid oxygen (you can see tankers of this stuff all over the place nearby - Air Products has a big operation neaby), well, small boom, fire, then BIIIIIG boom. Or, maybe, if you’re going with the bridge across a gorge, maybe it’s just an oxygen tanker passing through at just the wrong moment.
Or maybe there’s a small industrial operation that gets backup power from a diesel generator, and has a largish fuel tank?
Maybe we’re back to the hospital, and it has a backup diesel generator with a few days fuel on hand (plus a few hundred cubic feet of lovely liquid oxgen in external storage tanks)… Maybe the generator is a backup to a backup, hasn’t been used in years, and the fuel tank is leaky and has bled down to the point where the fuel/vapor/air inside has reached a stoichiometric mixture… ka-BLAM!