Thursday, April 18, 2013

The terrible beauty of chemistry

When certain chemicals are on fire, spraying them with water makes them explode. :(

Worried about the folks in West, Texas.

2 comments:

Old NFO said...

Yep, and they STILL don't know how many are missing... Sad and thoughts and prayers for all of them.

Matt G said...

Looking up the stuff in the book: anhydrous ammonia: Don't touch with water. Highly reactive. Move back 1600 meters. Or further.

Ammonium nitrate: More water is better. Drown it. You cannot put too much water on it; impossible.

That plant had both, with over 500M tons of Ammonium nitrate there. Possibly a BLEVE occurred on an anhydrous tank, and set off the Ammonium nitrate.

We have to wait and see, right now.