at the temporal coordinates: 10/4/01 4:30 AM, the entity known as Jon Glass
at jonglass_at_usa.net conveyed the following:
>
> on 10/3/01 11:52 PM, Guy MITTAUX at guy.mittaux_at_free.fr wrote:
>
>> Did you heard about the explosion in the chemical industry ?
>
> I've been following it on the news. It was a true tragedy. I remember
> hearing about it only shortly after the blast, and they had shut down the
> airports or something, and stopped communication into and out of the city.
>
> Supposedly, it was merely a bad mixture of chemicals, not anything
> intentional.
>
> I'll tell you what surprised me were the picture of cars several km away,
> and they were crushed, merely by the concussion of the blast (and probably
> from other cars, but it didn't look that way) It was an enormous mess. I
> have American friends who sometimes spend time in the area, and I was
> worried about them. You all have my sympathies. It's a shame it happened
> after the attacks on America, because it sure deserves more notice, like the
> shooting in Switzerland.
Ammonium nitrate can be BAD STUFF! Especially if an accident disperses it
into the air PRIOR to the explosion, or if it is otherwise in a form that
presents a great deal of surface area. IIRC, in 1947, a SHIPLOAD of this
stuff went up in Texas City, TX, near Houston. My somewhat hazy
recollection of reading about this was that the explosion was rated at about
1/2 of Hiroshima. An impressively large hunk of the ship (read a ton or so
of steel) landed something like a km or so away. I can easily believe the
destruction the explosion in France caused.
- Eric.
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