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

Chapter Eight: Liquified Natural Gas 97pened in a derailment near Oneonta, New York, in 1974. LPG vapor from acrushed LPG car quickly ignited and formed a fireball. Fire fighters attempting tocool down several other LPG cars were caught in a subsequent explosion; fiftyfourwere injured.... In a 1974 railyard accident near Decatur, Illinois, an LPG railcarwas punctured; the resulting cloud did not ignite immediately, but spread andthen exploded over an area one-half by three-quarters of a mile. [The blast was feltforty-five miles away; 67 such unconfined vapor-air explosions are similar to thosecaused by military fuel-air bombs, some of which use propane.] There were sevendeaths, three hundred forty-nine injuries, and twenty-four million dollars in damage[including blast damage out to two and a half miles]. Litter and debris...coveredtwenty blocks of the city.... LPG railcars travel through densely populatedareas of cities, even cities which prohibited LPG storage. 68LPG trains could easily be derailed at any desired point: “youth gangs frequentlyplace obstacles on tracks which delay freight trains in New York Cityjust to harass the trainmen,” 69 and similarly in Los Angeles. 70 Sabotage causingserious damage to trains has occurred across the U.S., 71 including trainscarrying LPG (which fortunately did not leak) 72 and chlorine (whose leakagein a Florida derailment killed eight people and injured nearly a hundred). 73LPG railcars are only a tenth as numerous as tankers carrying other hazardouscargoes, and are thus likely to occur in the same trains with chlorine,oil, industrial chemicals, and so forth. Such cargoes and LPG can endangereach other. Railcars spend a good deal of time sitting in switchyards wherethey are subject to tampering and fires. Ammunition trains have blown up inswitchyards. A few years ago, a chemical tank car being shunted inWashington State exploded with the force of several World War II blockbusters.A forty-hour fire in a railcar of toxic ethylene oxide recently shut thePort of Newark and curtailed flights at Newark International Airport for fearof an explosion that could hurl shrapnel for a mile. 74 Far less would be enoughto breach an LPG railcar. Its steel wall is only five-eighths of an inch thick,and “can be easily cut with pocket size explosive devices [or by] many otherweapons commonly used by terrorists....” 75 A small leak can be dangerousbecause LPG vapor is heavier than air even when it warms up (unlike LNGvapor, which is heavier than air only so long as it remains chilled). LPG vaporcan therefore flow for long distances along the ground or in sewers or tunnels.When a mixture of between about two and nine percent LPG vapor in airreaches a small spark, it will ignite or explode.LPG terminals, as well as shipments by road and rail, penetrate the mostvulnerable parts of our industrial system. The General Accounting Office haspublished an aerial photograph of a major LPG receiving terminal near LosAngeles Harbor. 76 Its propane storage tanks, a stone’s throw from the PalosVerdes earthquake fault, are surrounded on one side by a large U.S. Navy fuel