McEWEN, Tenn. (AP) — The blast in rural Tennessee that leveled an explosives plant and was felt for miles around left no survivors, authorities said Saturday.
The total number of dead was unclear, as was the cause of the Friday blast. By the weekend, the devastation came into focus, with officials saying they had found no survivors. A total of 16 people were missing, officials said.
“There’s a gauntlet of emotions there,” Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said during a news conference, pausing to clear his throat before he asked for prayers for the families of the victims in a shaky voice.
“We’ve recovered no survivors,” he added.
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I can’t imagine safety regulations wouldn’t have included separation of large amounts of explosives by distance or with some kind of materials to avoid such a catastrophic explosion.
So, they do. Unfortunately, there aren’t realistic safety precautions that can be taken that don’t have some risk of catastrophic failure if you’re dealing with the manufacturing and storage of explosives. Even small quantities are destructive enough to be dangerous to store.
Ultimately safe storage comes down to human operational concerns. Missing or unenforced regulations relating to working hours, training, training compliance, or handling safety concerns would be my guess rather than storage conditions.
Didn’t I read somewhere that they were operating at a faster than normal pace?
It wouldn’t surprise me, but I haven’t heard anything like that. Tough production schedules are a great way to cause incidents.
It is absolutely possible to work with smaller batches so that if something goes wrong it doesn’t take out the entire fucking building. It’s just less profitable.
I didn’t say it was impossible, just unrealistic. The cost increase for producing in batches smaller than what can cause a problem aren’t worth it if you afterwards just put it in the same pile. Customers aren’t going to want to take delivery as dozens of small shipments spread out over months, but in batches determined by how fast they use it and how much buffer they need. They’re certainly not going to want that rate slowed down by the factory having other customers.
The place where regulatory oversight is missing is in making sure that management isn’t pushing workers to work unsafely, or even letting them if they try.
You can blather on about theoretical customers that for some reason are warehousing unsafe quantities, but I don’t understand why thats relevant since this happened at the originating factory, not Imaginary Negligent Munitions Assembler, Inc. You say that working in safe quantities “isn’t worth it”. I must ask: it isn’t worth it to whom? The families of the obliterated corpses? Or just the greedy rich owners of the factory?
You’re lining up for a strawman. I very clearly stated that fault was with the owners and management for not enforcing safe operating procedures.
I disagreed that the gap in regulation was likely because of safe storage quantities, and more likely because of a failure to enforce safe operating practices.
Don’t make it out to be like I’m saying nothing could have been done to save these people’s lives.
I’m saying expecting an explosives manufacturer to have less than what’s used in a typical charge onsite at any moment is unrealistic, as is storing reasonable quantities such that catastrophe is impossible. Any storage and manufacturing practices that could give you those guarantees would also require a rigorous training process and strong safety culture with well defined and enforced procedures and safeguards.
What, in your mind, is a reasonable and safe quantity of explosives to warehouse for the manufacture of bombs?
By their nature, bombs contain an unsafe quantity of explosives. Safety comes from handling, not saying you can only have half of a 500lb bomb at a time.
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