Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

96Disasters Waiting to Happenwalled. It is therefore more vulnerable to breakage through accident or sabotage.LPG trucks are also more likely to explode in fires, both because theyare uninsulated and because their cargo creates very high pressures by boilingwhen exposed to heat.Many LPG truck accidents have occurred worldwide 58 —often through faultyrepairs, delivery procedures, or valve operations. 59 A truck laden with thirtyfourcubic meters of LPG, for example, overturned in 1973 on a mountain roadabove Lynchburg, Virginia, creating a fireball more than four hundred feet indiameter. 60 Four people were burned to death at the site, and three more at a distanceby the radiant heat. In a far more destructive accident near Eagle Pass,Texas in 1975, a thirty-eight-cubic-meter LPG tank broke loose from its trailer.Two explosions blew the front of the tank about sixteen hundred feet and therear (in three pieces) some eight hundred feet. Sixteen people were killed andthirty-five injured. 61 In Berlin, New York, in 1962, a twenty-eight-cubic-meterLPG semi-trailer jack-knifed, hit a tree, and split. The tank was propelled eightyfeet back up the road, spewing gas as it went. After some minutes, the gas, havingspread over about five acres, ignited and burned in a few seconds, engulfingten buildings and causing ten deaths and seventeen injuries. 62 And in WestSt. Paul, Minnesota, a midnight LPG delivery fire in 1974 killed four people anddemolished large sections of three apartment buildings. 63LPG railcars, each containing about one hundred fifteen cubic meters(equivalent to about an eighteenth of a Hiroshima yield),are involved in many of the ten thousand railroad accidents that occur in this countryeach year. There are often more than ten consecutive LPG cars on a train. Eachcar can form a ten-second fireball about [four hundred feet]... in radius. 64This can cause third- and second-degree burns out to nearly three thousand feetand to one mile respectively. 65 The range can be even larger. In 1973, a slightlyoversized railcar of LPG developed a small leak while being unloaded. The ensuingsmall fire burst the tank after nineteen minutes, causing a fireball nearly athousand feet in diameter. Thirteen people were killed. Many of the ninety-fivepeople injured were standing along a highway a thousand feet from the track. 66The General Accounting Office’s safety study of both LPG and LNGnotes a further danger of LPG tankers and railcars:If vapors from one LPG car ignite, the fire may rupture an unpunctured car in a“Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion,” or BLEVE [where sudden depressurizationrapidly boils and expels the LPG as an aerosol-vapor-air mixture]. Eachfire and explosion contributes to the heating and weakening of neighboring carsand makes additional explosions more likely. A BLEVE can rocket a forty-fivethousand-poundsteel section of a tank for a quarter of a mile. This is what hap-