Blast Levels Everything Very Efficiently, Firefighter 1, the first 5 minutes of class.
BTW, beer kegs don’t BLEVE unless you fill them with a combustible liquid first. The beer keg is a classic pressure vessel failure.
That’s the slang version. Officially, it’s Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion.
I read about the story a few weeks back prior to the lawsuit (when it was a police investigation) and thought it was yet another Darwin winner. Unfortunately it wasn’t the moron to put the keg on the fire that tasted his own ultimate stupidity. Arguably though, the death of one of his friends at the hands of his own idiocy may prove to be a better punishment in the long run. If he doesn’t stop drinking, he probably won’t be having any more keggers. In either case, his stupidity will be haunting him for a very long time to come.
It’s possible that a warning label might dissuade a small number of people from making a stupid lethal mistake, it’s also possible that such a warning label might provoke some people to try it out - “Hey, it says ‘may explode if burned in a fire’ - Cool! - let’s try it!”
Well, duh. I was piling on with the slang definitions.
Let me also reiterate:* beer does not BLEVE. * Unless some moron somewhere tries to carbonate his/her brew with propane…
Psst, see post 16.
I like Vunderbob’s description. I’ll have to remember that one, along with the slang description I learned in Hazmat Ops.
The first five minutes of my Firefighter 1 class was spent on ‘Sexual Harrassment in the Classroom Setting.’ Sheesh.
Tell me, DWC, what is the flashpoint of Budweiser? :dubious:
Pressure vessel failure != BLEVE
Sure, when you are at an outdoor party. I was thinking more along the lines of when a keg is attached to a CO2 tank, as the vast majority of kegs are. A regulator failure probably isn’t good. Maybe a small CO2 tank won’t provide enough pressure to burst the keg. But I’ve been in bars that had several dozen types of beer on line, and I can’t imagine each keg has it’s own small tank. Maybe they do, but I’d think a big tank (or maybe several) would be common.
Any bartenders here who know how multiple kegs are pressurized? One idea that comes to mind is that the overpressure valve is on the CO2 line rather than the kegs. That makes sense.
How many of those get thrown on a fire?
I bartended for awhile in college. Yes, multiple kegs use a single “large” CO2 tank. By large, I mean the ones that are about 4.5’ high and about 8" diameter (this is just from memory, I don’t recall exactly). If there were to be a regulatory failure, one hose would most likely burst long before the keg was in danger of reaching its yield point (the hoses are not designed for a very high psig).
Also, unless you started a fire in a kegerator, as Contrapuntal stated, there’s not really much of a chance of this happening. Even if there was a fire in the walk-in, the hoses would melt the hoses before the keg began to get substantially hot. The hoses used in this system, as stated earlier, are not nearly as robust as those used for oxy-acet applications, for example. They don’t have to be, as CO2 isn’t flamable.
::edit::
And yes, the regulator is part of the valve on the tank.
Also, when in use, there is a PRV on the tank, as part of the tap.
That’s pretty much it. We had a party not long ago, and our beer-brewing friend brought over a Rube Goldbergesque assortment consisting of two kegs, a jockey box, a CO[sub]2[/sub] tank roughly the size of a typical scuba tank and a whole lotta hoses. From the tank’s valve, he just ran a Y-splitter, and from there, hoses to the kegs, then hoses to the jockey box and its taps. For more kegs, you’d simply use a manifold with more outlets.
The regulator can be either part of the CO[sub]2[/sub] tank, or separate, to accommodate different beverages that want to be dispensed at different pressures. (eg: beer vs hard cider)
I hear Jay Leno try to make jokes about playing quarters and they always fail. Then Kevin asks him what the game is and he never says. Is that a common game? How is it played?
Bullets don’t so shit when you throw them into a fire. It’s the expansion of gasses in the barrel propelling the bullet that make it dangerous. Throw it in a fire, and it’s just a firecracker with a hunk of lead on one side.
And now you’ve read me fail the same way.
Quarters is played with a rocks glass of beer (and more beer), a relatively clean table (so the quarter doesn’t just stick), and more than one person. The basic game goes like this:
- Fill the glass with beer
- Have Player 1 attempt to bounce the quarter off the table and into the glass.
3a. If he misses, in the basic game, the quarter is passed to the next person.
3b. If he makes it, Player 1 indicates which player should drink the beer in the glass. - Repeat.
There are endless variations, of course. Player 1 may get three tries, and have to drink the beer himself if he doesn’t get it,then pass the quarter. Sometimes, there is no pointing allowed, and anyone who points has to drink the beer. Play with rum instead of beer, and third place is a trip to the lovely emergency room. Second place is carrying third place, and first place is driving to the emergency room.
The flashpoint of Bud isn’t material to the discussion. Contrary to posts by others, a BLEVE can and will occur with a non flammable or non combustible commodity. It’s all about pressure, the ability of a fluid to absorb thermal energy and the ultimate failure strength of a vessel. A propane tanker will deliver a newsworthy video opportunity when it fails, but a nitrogen tanker will offer an equally OMFG reaction when it lets go.
Do you have any reason to believe that A: kegs don’t already have printed warnings regarding heat and explosion, just like the kind that every other pressurized container has, and B: that any of the people who put kegs on fires are doing so because they are unaware of what might happen? On the contrary, I would be willing to guess that 99% of the people putting kegs in fires are doing so precisely because they think the kegs will burst.