Thanks for watching check out me other bits! Outro song: th-cam.com/video/9HgQ8qJSuVY/w-d-xo.html Instagram: instagram.com/plainly.john/ Patreon: www.patreon.com/Plainlydifficult Merch: plainly-difficult.creator-spring.com Twitter:twitter.com/Plainly_D
Hiya - I’m a new watcher and have been enjoying your videos! Random question: what is the meaning of the white and black bars that pop up every so often in the upper right corner of the screen?
If you are interested in a building failure, the Newcastle (in Australia) Workers Club collapsed in the 1989 Earthquake due to insufficient columns. There are a couple of publications by Melchers who discusses why it happened.
Entire place explodes and power cut off to local area and local people have to leave due to pollution caused. plainly - just rates it as a bad day at the office nothing to see here
At this point, I'm honestly not even surprised that so *freaking many* of these stories have their root cause as being "Nah, let's not spend money to be safe."
Profits over safety invades so many management mindsets, so easily. So easily we give up the safety of others, for a thing we made up, called currency.
I used to always ask myself how people could have possibly ignored all the warning signs before an imminent disaster. But then I found the answer: Practice. In nearly every case, management had spent years if not decades practicing the art of ignoring warning signs and training their employees to do likewise. In fancier words, it's called normalization of deviance. To anyone interested in learning by example from masters of the art, I recommend reading up on how NASA's management lead to the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
In the case of Bhopal the employees over-rode every safety system installed. There is still an arrest warrant out for the Union Carbide executives and I think that is very unfair.
My father worked at a fertilizer plant for 25 years. I worked there a couple of summers during college. Safety was always a concern but production was the primary driver of many decisions.
One more piece of critique, John: the schematics you include are so simple that they just work, and i like that. Simplified, no clutter, just the important bits. And its true to your style. Don't change a thing!
@@jimmyduncan7650 It's not healthy to lose assets in a company human capital or otherwise in a worksite accident or explosions of an unknown type then over the following decades large percentage of manufacturing went near shore and off shore
At a plant like this, as soon as things start to fail, it's time to start using sick days and writing a resume'. Run, don't walk to the nearest exit. 'Only job available is at the local convenience store? Good! I'll take it! '(as long as it's at least a mile from the plant...).
I stand corrected. Neutralize is a term used in LE and military lingo. It means the hostile has been killed or otherwise rendered unable to be a threat.
I think a lot of these problems could be avoided if we treated Ammonium Nitrate not as a fertilizer with a chance to explode, but as an explosive that can be used as fertilizer.
Great vid, John! Disagree with "Bad day at the office". BDATO is normally good working conditions but everyone rolled a "1" that day (aka "Failed the saving throw"). This one was more like "Murderous management". It was bad management that never established documented safety protocols for workers to follow.
Agreed. Though I do think that it is most certainly a bad day at the office if the office explodes, I also think an exploding office warrants a higher rating.
Well, I'm going out on a limb and suggesting, "It sure as hell wasn't a GOOD day at the office!" SO maybe, at the least, John's not wrong... entirely. ;o)
I've been watching your channel for over year but I never thought you would cover something so close to me! I worked at a textiles factory just a mile north of this place when it blew up. I was at home in bed about 15 miles away when it blew. It jolted me awake and I thought the neighbors horse had escaped its corral and made its way on to my front porch or something. When I went to work that day the whole area reeked like ammonia, but no one told us to not come in or to wear a gas mask or anything. My dad worked at the power plant a few miles south of that place and when he pulled up to the security at the front gates everyone was wearing gas masks and they wouldn't let him in without putting one on. It's weird to think that was almost 30 years ago. Did you cover "The Crash of flight 232"? That happened just next door to that plant only like five years prior or something. A lot of people died, real heartbreaking. That whole area is prone to disaster for some reason.
I imagine that when first placed in production, the plant's operators were better trained. It's been my experience that complacency grows as time between failures increases, which leads to corresponding reduction in the urgency to train and maintain - a nasty degenerative feedback loop.
@@lolallday08 May because it is a very human tendency to develop routine, habits: same old, same old. Erosion is slow and insidious in nature but also in human affairs.
The computer automation probably bred complacency. Rather than needing chemical engineers on staff to do smaller batches and measuring out portions, they could be replaced with button pushers who don't really understand what they're doing "uhhh there's a blinky light on the console here, whatsit mean?"
@@DMahalko eh idk about that, seems kinda disrespectful to the staff (pretty sure homer simpson is not an accurate representation of actual safety monitors lol) and it's not like factories in the past were any safer, if anything they were more dangerous
Thank you for another straightforward, no-nonsense insight. Your channel (and the USCSB one's) are the gold standard of easily accessible, informative, well-told "how did this happen?"-reports. I hope you pick up the railway accident report series again. The derailment between Leiferde and Meinersen, Germany 1969 is far too unknown, as well as the Langenweddingen level crossing disaster, both co-caused by penny-pinching. But whatever you're going to cover next, I'll watch it for sure!
I remember when this happened. It shook my childhood house knocking a couple things off the shelves making our grandmother rush us all to the basement not sure what to do thinking we where getting bombed. My second Grade teacher's husband was working at the plant at the time and was one of the injured people. Video brought back a lot of old memories.
Thank you once again my dude. A part of me hopes you never run out of topics...until I stop to think about what that means for those poor souls who have to suffer through these tragedies. Conundrum!
You mean: you hope this crap keeps happening (for the interesting videos) _while_ you think about what that means for those poor souls suffering through it? I could understand if you wanted that until you _started_ thinking about the victims, but damn.
Yeah. My high school "amateur pyrotechnician" friends used a lot of fertiliser in their concoctions, most notably when they blew up an abandoned barn... Strangely, 30 yrs later, we're all still alive and not behind bars.
"To add a cherry to the faeces pie..." Best line I've heard in at least the last 2 years. As a quality assurance engineer, and a lifelong cynic, I assure you that this phrase will be immediately incorporated and frequently used in my lexicon.
Dear author, thank you very much for this video. It is helping me with some engineering classes preparations. It helps to emphasize how important the details are.
At this point, I think fertilizer plant management needs to live either on the plant grounds, or less than a mile away. That would probably make them care about plant safety.
And the company execs… things would surely change for the better if the rich actually had to pay the price for their penny pinching and not the working class instead.
Hey Plainly difficult ! Thanks for being around, and i'm glad to know that you produce regularly. This kind of disaster remind me of the AZF explosion in 2001, south west of france. I'm sure this disaster could be a video
The way "Terra" turns into "Terror" in John's accent seems all too appropriate for this one, yikes! 😯 It's always fairly horrifying to me just how many of these fairly major disasters appear to have happened internationally during my teenage years, and just how few of them I've ever heard of? Makes one devoutly hope that safety measures have improved in our current era, but...!! 😵💫
If you freeze-frame on the report page, it refers to a pH reading of 60 being acidic. They're clearly using something other than the standard pH scale. It would be good to know what their reference is.
@@HighInfoSource Well spotted. That's most likely the % concentration then. Nitric acid for fertilizer production is commonly supplied at concentrations between 61 and 72%. The pH of 60% concentration would be around 1.5 PS I just checked a few references and -1.5 could be the pKa on the Bronsted-Lowry acidity scale. But that's not the same as a pH of -1.5
I live so close to this that you can actually see my neighborhood at 0:50 to the right of the airport at the top of the screen. Nobody in the community talks about this tragedy, in fact the younger generation don’t even know it happened. Such a shame because the causes of it are being repeated countless times in local industries
OMG. I heard that explosion. I was in the old strategic command building turned into a packing house at the Sioux City airport. It's a bomb proof building, and it was loud. Someone's car was on fire in the parking lot when I entered the building. I was told that the firemen packed up because they knew they were going to get the call and left immediately. RIP to the victims of that day. I will never forget.
While I dont watch all your content I do love every video I watch that you’ve made. It explains thing simply and precisely. Give a nice and quick explanation on the events and doesn’t add a ton of fill BS. Keep up the amazing work. I’m always glad to come back to this channel
Funny side note from a trip to South Sioux City Nebraska years ago I see the signs for the Fertilizer plant right next to the power plant and though hey that is a wonderful idea. Little did I know it had already proven to be a poor decision years prior!
For people questioning ph -1 thing, that's true. The ph scale is estimative and relative. It's defined from 1 to 14 but it's totally possible to reach values of -2 and 16.
Yay, an event in Iowa! Since I've never heard of this incident in my 14 years in Iowa, I hope those involved in that industry learned a lesson and haven't forgotten a lesson.
To anyone wondering what's there now, it seems the factory's still in operation and was fully rebuilt as far as I can tell. Where the blast happened seems to have been rebuilt although the epicentre seems to have been left barren. It just looks like a big building shaped patch of grass from what I can tell.
Ahhh, yes...the Port Neal explosion. I lived in nearby Sioux City at the time and needless to say, it was the talk of the town. My ex-wife worked at one of the two local hospitals at that time and cared for a few of the injured employees. The Port Neal Terra site is now home to a much larger fertilizer facility which was built for ~$2 billion several years ago. Terra Chemical as it was back the doesn't exist anymore due to the typical merger and acquisition cycles that smaller and merger businesses go through. Also, the power plant referenced in the video, locally referred to as "Neal 4" and owned by MidAmerican Energy wasn't / isn't actually on the other side of the Missouri River, it's maybe 2.5 miles north of the fertilizer site on the same side (Iowa side) of the river.
I listen to your videos while i work they're always very interesting. Sometimes in the evening I'll sit down and watch them tho you have such a calming way of speaking i end up drifting off and missing things😅😂 i have to go back and listen again.
Got really psyched when I saw Port Neal, grew up in Sioux City and while it happened the year I was born I still feel the general vibe residents have towards the Terra corp You should check out the failure that was the corp of engineers dealing with snowmelt that caused massive flooding in the 2000’s
Hey John! Love the videos you put out, they're always both interesting and educational! Unfortunately, there is one thing that keeps bugging me, and that is the fact that the Scheherazade intro music snippet temporarily cuts over to mono, and only has audio on the right channel for a brief moment. A very very minor gripe, but as I do try to watch all your videos it keeps popping up and annoys me every time. Since you are also making music yourself, I don't think it would be a major task to fix it - and it would (at least for me) put to rest that tiny annoyance that's plagued every video since the beginning. Either way, both with and without this admittedly minor audio annoyance I do love your videos and I hope you keep it up!
As a EMT student the previous year in sioux city we discussed this in class when we got to emergency management and MCIs, also it expanded several years ago and is even bigger then before
Would have appreciated a bit of a run down on the characteristics of the decomposition and what the actual reactions were that took place, also a "how could it have been handled correctly"
At the heart of it, anyone wants you to work around nitric acid then its time to go find something else to do a long, long way away from that stuff. By itself its scary enough and people will think of all the horrible burns it can cause, but at a chemical level it turns all sorts of things into explosions, fire and death.
I was one of those 3000 displaced by this event, the blast was strong enough to break windows over 10 miles away and topple heavy items inside of homes. We were evacuated from our school a couple hours after the blast and couldn't return home for a couple of days.
Ammonium Nitrate seems to explode frequently. I've seen quite a few disaster short-docs about ammonium nitrate explosions. That gigantic explosion in Beirut in 2020 was ammonium nitrate.
I live on the other side of the State of Iowa and I remember hearing and reading about the plant explosion a few times back in 94 but nothing since then. As far as the legacy of it goes... Lawmakers in this state have a long history of putting production & profit over safety. It's one of the big reasons why they're been working to change the labor laws in 2023 to allow teenagers as young as 14 to work in previously prohibited places like mines, slaughterhouses, meatpacking, construction, metal working and other dangerous environments if it supposedly part of at "work-based learning program." It would also allow 16-17 year-old's to serve alcohol while allowing teens 14-18 to work as late as 9pm on school nights or 11pm during the summer. It would also allow 14 1/2 year-old's a drivers license and not just a school or learners permit.
Nice! When I get done streaming later, I'm watching this! John is one of the best at delivering disaster / incident history as well as a fairly decent producer of music! Stay awesome John!
I agree with the other posters, your grfx are great, and I appreciate the time you put into your productions. And I wasn't up on this incident, but 1994 was one the fav times of my life, and was successfully working, so I was a bit distracted.
I live in Iowa and did some rescue work at this Terra Plant...The sighyts and smells still lingter with me First Responders fire and resuce came from several counties away. It was a lot more destrucftive than the public will evfer know..
I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska,USA, when this plant blew up. You did not mention the increased costs of fertilizer. This after the 1993 floods. Not a good time for farmers. I enjoyed your video. Thank you. As usual, profits first, safety second.😮😢😮
Love these kinds videos, and love how you explain things. Recommendation: Meat plant explosion in Booneville, Arkansas 2008, Easter day. From what I remember, no one was killed luckily. I dont know much in the way of details sadly, as I was a kid at the time and only barely remembered some details of it.
At the time of the blast I lived in Dakota City which was approximately 2 miles west of Port Neal on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. I was in the shower when the shockwave struck. I thought a car had veered off the road and slammed into our house. I don’t remember being evacuated though however both my wife and I were gone to work by 7.
HI PD! I really liked the video, depending on how in depth you want to go (and how long you want your videos to go for...), some potential future suggestions to make this and future videos more comprehensive: Explore enabling conditions: - The facility had not performed a HAZOP/PHA and the known hazards were extremely lacking (the EPA report lists 2 - oil contamination of AN -ie making ANFO and excess heating - creating thermal decomposition, there are dozens more and multiple reasons they can occur), while the maintenance strategy applied was clearly ineffective at managing facility integrity (I can't tell if it was just budget or strategy - probably both in this case). - The EPA investigation states the DCS upgrade and scrubber installation was poorly understood by plant personnel and a management of change system was basically non-existent. Explore in further detail the origin of the events of the day (potentially just a table of the elements and how it had happened), to effectively turn the neutraliser in to a bomb: - The chloride contamination - the NA plant feed stream had not been sampled for 14 years prior. - Oil contamination was potentially present in the reactor (making an ANFO mix) as contamination had occurred previously from compressor failures - the EPA wasn't able to rule this in or out. - The use of high pressure steam actively added energy, was really stupid and not aligned with industry practice (you'd generally just waterflood or use low pressure steam, while watching instrumentation to see what was happening in the process), while the lack of flow basically made it a closed inventory. - Explain further how these low density zones reduced activation energy and confinement effectively aided to create conditions favourable for detonation - how the event went from thermal decomposition, to deflagration, to detonation (presumably very quickly) - and how both the neutraliser and rundown tank exploded. Explore what could have been done to reduce the likelihood of this happening: - Management supporting and paying for a PHA, writing procedures & training - Operators having been trained in how the plant works and how to operate the DCS - education of key hazards to the plant & operations/maintenance personnel, with operating procedures incorporating the above. - Improved instrumentation that functioned - Robust management of change process - Other operators using check valves on spargers to avert reverse flow, steam usage rules, increasing pH of AN solution before depositing it in the rundown tank, not allowing no-flow conditions to last more than a few hours etc. Explore related events: - The West, Texas event springs to mine as it also involved poor storage practices and sensitisation of AN (with the initiating event being very different).
USCSB videos go into such detail. Don't expect that from this channel. It's more of an overview of events with some levity mixed in. With that said, I agree with your suggestions.
@@ronbennett7885 Agreed - in this instance, I feel some of the nuance from the EPA report and the incident that occurred was lost by not peering a bit deeper, but making these videos is hard and I just want to try and provide constructive suggestions to those who are brave enough to do it (I'm certainly not!) 😄
I would question a Ph figure of -1.5, unless you are dealing with weird things like pure H3SO4+ in absence of water. Apparently pure Fluorosulfuric acid (HSO3F) would be a magic acid with a PH of -20, but I don't think it can actually be synthesized (edit: I mean as pure in absence of water). Still, a PH of 1.5 would be very acidic, and quite dangerous.
İ think it was around 5 mins in the video when the narrator said pH minus 1.5 just a note but pH can never be negative it is a logarithmic scale between 1 and 14. So i assume he meant pH 1.5 and not ph negative 1.5
My dad works at mid American port Neal or something like that. Every day I think about if something were to go bad at his plant, or the fertilizer one as it did in 1994. Very scary
I live on the (ILL)inois side of the IA/IL border and I have never previously heard of this case? Although, I was only 17 in 1994- so, I'm guessing that if I did, it was of no consequence to me or I just wasn't paying attention to begin with. Which both sounds about accurate of my 17 year old attitude!! 😅 Thank you for your hard work and dedication to research and bring us the facts and details in all of these interesting cases. You do a wonderful job. Please, keep it up!! 👍🏻😁
In 1994 I lived in Sioux City, about 15 miles away from the plant. I remember being woken up by the blast, the windows rattling on my house and my house shaking noticeably. I had no clue what was going on at the time - I thought it might have been an earthquake or something. I worked a "2nd shift" job at the time, so 6 AM was basically the middle of the night for me. I shrugged it off and went back to sleep. It was only later in the day that I heard about a massive explosion at the Terra plant and connected that with being shaken out of bed that morning. Being powerful enough to rattle my house and shake me awake from 15 miles away, it's no wonder this disaster makes the list of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for people living nearby.
Howdy John Yet another tale of incompetence on a massive scale. What form of mental illness I must have, anxiously looking forward to each and every video you post, WHEEE! I blame my father, an absolutely awesome engineer that worked with massive free span structures. And, he was a great dad, always sharing information with me, never dumbing the subject matter, making my little pre-engineering mind work. It all started when I was a wee boy. He would share a tale of incompetence, arrogance, and apathy, that would ultimately, lead to a preventable structural collapse. These stories were in a monthly engineering trade publication, whose name is lost in the clutter of my tired mind. They, like your videos, took complicated calculations and presented them in an understandable fashion. Anyway, enough of that warm and fuzzy memory. If you haven’t already done so, a video of the West Texas feed store ammonium nitrate explosion would be interesting. It’s a sad trail of funding cuts by the state for the needed site inspectors that would lead to the illegal storage of ammonium nitrate fertilizer by the owners of the facility. This in turn lead to the destruction of a large chunk of the town of West, and of course needless deaths. Anyway, your content is always entertaining and informative. Thanks!
I lived about 7 miles from Port Neal when this occurred. My classmates dad was one of the people who died. The explosion woke me up and my mom was frantically running around convinced a car had hit the house. The house sustained some minor damage. As soon as the news reported what had happened she took us kids with her when she left for work and dropped us with family in another city. I don’t remember any official evacuations being ordered but schools were shut down that day and we were told to not go outside as the air might not be safe to breathe.
Afghan veteran here, listening to your initial brief on what r get were making and the breakdown I was like “holy shit, these guys are making HME (homemade explosives)” 😂
Thanks for watching check out me other bits!
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Hiya - I’m a new watcher and have been enjoying your videos! Random question: what is the meaning of the white and black bars that pop up every so often in the upper right corner of the screen?
If you are interested in a building failure, the Newcastle (in Australia) Workers Club collapsed in the 1989 Earthquake due to insufficient columns. There are a couple of publications by Melchers who discusses why it happened.
Entire place explodes and power cut off to local area and local people have to leave due to pollution caused.
plainly - just rates it as a bad day at the office nothing to see here
At this point, I'm honestly not even surprised that so *freaking many* of these stories have their root cause as being "Nah, let's not spend money to be safe."
It’s all too common sadly
Profits over safety invades so many management mindsets, so easily. So easily we give up the safety of others, for a thing we made up, called currency.
I used to always ask myself how people could have possibly ignored all the warning signs before an imminent disaster. But then I found the answer: Practice. In nearly every case, management had spent years if not decades practicing the art of ignoring warning signs and training their employees to do likewise.
In fancier words, it's called normalization of deviance. To anyone interested in learning by example from masters of the art, I recommend reading up on how NASA's management lead to the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
@trumpisthemessiah7017 It is when it actually benefits the world. Which isn't often these days. Not noticeably so, anyway.
In the case of Bhopal the employees over-rode every safety system installed. There is still an arrest warrant out for the Union Carbide executives and I think that is very unfair.
My father worked at a fertilizer plant for 25 years. I worked there a couple of summers during college. Safety was always a concern but production was the primary driver of many decisions.
In the words of another favorite TH-camr of mine "capitalism only works if nobody is a dickhead" and this, seems like some dickheads were involved 😮
Ain't that always the way....
Business as usual.
Safety always takes a back seat to profit. It sucks.
As always, in any industry.
One more piece of critique, John: the schematics you include are so simple that they just work, and i like that. Simplified, no clutter, just the important bits. And its true to your style. Don't change a thing!
Thank you
Maybe the CEOs and bean counters should be required to watch these videos before being allowed to run and budget these plants!
@@charmcitytoe Well they're never all that concerned about the guy operating the equipment. Shame really.
@@jimmyduncan7650 It's not healthy to lose assets in a company human capital or otherwise in a worksite accident or explosions of an unknown type then over the following decades large percentage of manufacturing went near shore and off shore
At a plant like this, as soon as things start to fail, it's time to start using sick days and writing a resume'. Run, don't walk to the nearest exit.
'Only job available is at the local convenience store? Good! I'll take it! '(as long as it's at least a mile from the plant...).
very good advice!!
I have a buddy who's worked in all the local factories... he always says "they just feel like they're overdue for something terrible to happen"
@@RobKaiser_SQuest "666 days since last accident." 😓
When you have back to back nitric acid leaks, you nope the fuck out of there.
replacing your neutralizer with a crater is never a good thing
Opened up additional storage...
They got neutralized alright! I think you mean fertilizer.
I stand corrected. Neutralize is a term used in LE and military lingo. It means the hostile has been killed or otherwise rendered unable to be a threat.
I think a lot of these problems could be avoided if we treated Ammonium Nitrate not as a fertilizer with a chance to explode, but as an explosive that can be used as fertilizer.
Fair point sir.
The Patriot Act has entered the chat.
Technically it's an oxidizer so it makes things around it spontaneously combust. Even things you don't think are flammable like solid steel
"Timothy Mcveigh would like to know your location"
It is shocking the number of fertilizer explosion accidents.
Cause fertilizer is dangerous
What does fertilizer contain?...
Very dangerous
@@PlainlyDifficult Texas City Anchor Memorial
@@PovidisII Stuff that blows up easily.
Great vid, John! Disagree with "Bad day at the office". BDATO is normally good working conditions but everyone rolled a "1" that day (aka "Failed the saving throw"). This one was more like "Murderous management". It was bad management that never established documented safety protocols for workers to follow.
Why have BDATO when you could have potato? Grow spuds instead!
Agreed. Though I do think that it is most certainly a bad day at the office if the office explodes, I also think an exploding office warrants a higher rating.
Well, I'm going out on a limb and suggesting, "It sure as hell wasn't a GOOD day at the office!" SO maybe, at the least, John's not wrong... entirely. ;o)
@@hauntedshadowslegacy2826
BDATO is great when superheated, unregulated, and smothered in butter.
Enjoy with friends!
Nah it’s BSDATO (barely survivable day at the office)
As someone who lives within 15 miles of this plant and whose family had a truck driver that worked for terra, I've never heard of this disaster...
I bet they tried real hard to bury all the news and history of it by washing it away with nonsense
Pretty good hush job by the management 😒
I've been watching your channel for over year but I never thought you would cover something so close to me! I worked at a textiles factory just a mile north of this place when it blew up. I was at home in bed about 15 miles away when it blew. It jolted me awake and I thought the neighbors horse had escaped its corral and made its way on to my front porch or something. When I went to work that day the whole area reeked like ammonia, but no one told us to not come in or to wear a gas mask or anything. My dad worked at the power plant a few miles south of that place and when he pulled up to the security at the front gates everyone was wearing gas masks and they wouldn't let him in without putting one on. It's weird to think that was almost 30 years ago. Did you cover "The Crash of flight 232"? That happened just next door to that plant only like five years prior or something. A lot of people died, real heartbreaking. That whole area is prone to disaster for some reason.
Thanks for the suggestion
Indian burial ground eh?
@@PlainlyDifficult I second the crash story!! Great channel brother!! Love from NH!!
It's always cool when we SC locals get mentioned
From 15 miles away it sounded like a horse on your front porch. It puts the magnitude of the explosion into perspective...
Always enjoy getting the weather report at the end of the videos. Thanks John.
Thank you
I imagine that when first placed in production, the plant's operators were better trained. It's been my experience that complacency grows as time between failures increases, which leads to corresponding reduction in the urgency to train and maintain - a nasty degenerative feedback loop.
The way this exact trope replays across various industries is honestly terrifying.
@@lolallday08 May because it is a very human tendency to develop routine, habits: same old, same old. Erosion is slow and insidious in nature but also in human affairs.
The computer automation probably bred complacency. Rather than needing chemical engineers on staff to do smaller batches and measuring out portions, they could be replaced with button pushers who don't really understand what they're doing "uhhh there's a blinky light on the console here, whatsit mean?"
@@DMahalko eh idk about that, seems kinda disrespectful to the staff (pretty sure homer simpson is not an accurate representation of actual safety monitors lol) and it's not like factories in the past were any safer, if anything they were more dangerous
Thank you for another straightforward, no-nonsense insight. Your channel (and the USCSB one's) are the gold standard of easily accessible, informative, well-told "how did this happen?"-reports.
I hope you pick up the railway accident report series again.
The derailment between Leiferde and Meinersen, Germany 1969 is far too unknown, as well as the Langenweddingen level crossing disaster, both co-caused by penny-pinching.
But whatever you're going to cover next, I'll watch it for sure!
I remember when this happened. It shook my childhood house knocking a couple things off the shelves making our grandmother rush us all to the basement not sure what to do thinking we where getting bombed. My second Grade teacher's husband was working at the plant at the time and was one of the injured people. Video brought back a lot of old memories.
Thank you once again my dude. A part of me hopes you never run out of topics...until I stop to think about what that means for those poor souls who have to suffer through these tragedies. Conundrum!
I know its a double edged sword!
Humans keep messing up, Plainly Difficult will keep getting more subjects!
That is the damn truth
You mean: you hope this crap keeps happening (for the interesting videos) _while_ you think about what that means for those poor souls suffering through it?
I could understand if you wanted that until you _started_ thinking about the victims, but damn.
@@nthgth I think he meant what we all know he meant
As soon as I see "Fertiliser" I get worried, Fertiliser was a contributing factor in the Beruit Explosion, Fertiliser is scary
Many more then just Beruit. Texas city disaster and the explosion in West
I'm not sure how that was related to the Beirut one... 🤔
@@PovidisII ammonium nitrate (many tons of it) was stored in the facility.
Yeah. My high school "amateur pyrotechnician" friends used a lot of fertiliser in their concoctions, most notably when they blew up an abandoned barn... Strangely, 30 yrs later, we're all still alive and not behind bars.
@@PovidisII Sorry, I was using ammonium nitrate and fertiliser interchangeably
"To add a cherry to the faeces pie..." Best line I've heard in at least the last 2 years.
As a quality assurance engineer, and a lifelong cynic, I assure you that this phrase will be immediately incorporated and frequently used in my lexicon.
I'm surprised the CSB hasn't covered this disaster on their channel already. Excellent work as always!
Excellent documentary, these are always so well done!
Thannk you!
Well, I'm glad massive amounts of nitrate were never stored inappropriately after this.
Thanks for all the informative videos! I’ve probably listened to each of them about 3x, especially the nuclear ones. 🧡from Texas
Thank you
I say this every few months, but please never ever change your intro music, its the best!!
Dear author, thank you very much for this video. It is helping me with some engineering classes preparations. It helps to emphasize how important the details are.
Glad it was helpful!
The graphics in these videos are extremely effective. They really complement your descriptions of the processes.
It’s pretty crazy that you can see the ring of the crater where the neutralizer used to be
well that is unfortunately not without precedence, try looking up the 1921 Oppau BSAF explosion....
At this point, I think fertilizer plant management needs to live either on the plant grounds, or less than a mile away. That would probably make them care about plant safety.
And the company execs… things would surely change for the better if the rich actually had to pay the price for their penny pinching and not the working class instead.
That wouldn't make a difference. The people who text while driving would totally take mild risks to avoid a major cost
Hey Plainly difficult !
Thanks for being around, and i'm glad to know that you produce regularly.
This kind of disaster remind me of the AZF explosion in 2001, south west of france.
I'm sure this disaster could be a video
Love your outro with the current weather - the little pause really makes it after really old ones always being sunny! Great stuff as always!
Your calm, chill narration is always a pleasure. I listen while I’m at work, and I always double check where our spill kits &c are. ;)
The way "Terra" turns into "Terror" in John's accent seems all too appropriate for this one, yikes! 😯 It's always fairly horrifying to me just how many of these fairly major disasters appear to have happened internationally during my teenage years, and just how few of them I've ever heard of? Makes one devoutly hope that safety measures have improved in our current era, but...!! 😵💫
A negative pH is possible but can't be measured using regular instruments. I think it must have been pH 1.5 which is already strongly acidic.
If you freeze-frame on the report page, it refers to a pH reading of 60 being acidic. They're clearly using something other than the standard pH scale. It would be good to know what their reference is.
Strong acids are often measured using instruments adequate to cover their pKa with some margin
@@HighInfoSource Well spotted. That's most likely the % concentration then. Nitric acid for fertilizer production is commonly supplied at concentrations between 61 and 72%. The pH of 60% concentration would be around 1.5
PS I just checked a few references and -1.5 could be the pKa on the Bronsted-Lowry acidity scale. But that's not the same as a pH of -1.5
I was wondering if it was -1.5 compared to a reference that isn't neutral. For example, if it's at a PH of 2.5 and 4.0 is their normal setpoint
Love the Error message!!
I live so close to this that you can actually see my neighborhood at 0:50 to the right of the airport at the top of the screen.
Nobody in the community talks about this tragedy, in fact the younger generation don’t even know it happened.
Such a shame because the causes of it are being repeated countless times in local industries
sir you have "based in mombasa" in your profile
😮
Thank you for another succinct analysis of the gist of how this disaster happened and the context around it.
OMG. I heard that explosion. I was in the old strategic command building turned into a packing house at the Sioux City airport. It's a bomb proof building, and it was loud.
Someone's car was on fire in the parking lot when I entered the building. I was told that the firemen packed up because they knew they were going to get the call and left immediately.
RIP to the victims of that day. I will never forget.
Thanks!
Thank you
While I dont watch all your content I do love every video I watch that you’ve made. It explains thing simply and precisely. Give a nice and quick explanation on the events and doesn’t add a ton of fill BS. Keep up the amazing work. I’m always glad to come back to this channel
Plainly Difficult, your channel is plainly awesome, thank you Sir!!!🙏👌👻❣️
Funny side note from a trip to South Sioux City Nebraska years ago I see the signs for the Fertilizer plant right next to the power plant and though hey that is a wonderful idea. Little did I know it had already proven to be a poor decision years prior!
The power plant is more likely to blow itself up than to be blown up by a neighbor
For people questioning ph -1 thing, that's true. The ph scale is estimative and relative. It's defined from 1 to 14 but it's totally possible to reach values of -2 and 16.
Thank you again John. Your content is always well researched, detailed and educational. Keep up the hard work!
As soon as I see a new upload, it makes me happy and I need to watch it.
Thank you
USA: "I have a knack for ammonium nitrate disasters"
Lebanon : "Hold my hummus"
A cherry atop a feces pile is a visual I shall cherish forevermore.
Bon appetite
Great channel. Really enjoy the humorous inserts and speech bubbles.
Yay, an event in Iowa! Since I've never heard of this incident in my 14 years in Iowa, I hope those involved in that industry learned a lesson and haven't forgotten a lesson.
Nothing gonna change until they start locking up the top brass.
Ammonium nitrate?
Thermal runaway?
Hot steam?
In an enclosed vessel?
I´m getting SS Grandcamp vibes here!
Safety tends to be something that's "too expensive" until after cheaping out wrecks a bunch of lives.
To anyone wondering what's there now, it seems the factory's still in operation and was fully rebuilt as far as I can tell. Where the blast happened seems to have been rebuilt although the epicentre seems to have been left barren. It just looks like a big building shaped patch of grass from what I can tell.
Ahhh, yes...the Port Neal explosion. I lived in nearby Sioux City at the time and needless to say, it was the talk of the town. My ex-wife worked at one of the two local hospitals at that time and cared for a few of the injured employees.
The Port Neal Terra site is now home to a much larger fertilizer facility which was built for ~$2 billion several years ago. Terra Chemical as it was back the doesn't exist anymore due to the typical merger and acquisition cycles that smaller and merger businesses go through.
Also, the power plant referenced in the video, locally referred to as "Neal 4" and owned by MidAmerican Energy wasn't / isn't actually on the other side of the Missouri River, it's maybe 2.5 miles north of the fertilizer site on the same side (Iowa side) of the river.
Thank you again, John ... for another eye-opener.
*Rest In Peace, All.*
Stay free, J. All the best. Rab 🕊
I listen to your videos while i work they're always very interesting. Sometimes in the evening I'll sit down and watch them tho you have such a calming way of speaking i end up drifting off and missing things😅😂 i have to go back and listen again.
Got really psyched when I saw Port Neal, grew up in Sioux City and while it happened the year I was born I still feel the general vibe residents have towards the Terra corp
You should check out the failure that was the corp of engineers dealing with snowmelt that caused massive flooding in the 2000’s
I love the music at the end, just bought your album on bandcamp!
I’ve been watching you for two years and the fact your doing a story on a place that i drive by daily is crazy to me!
How many shutdowns, failures, and leaks do you need in a week before you decide to shut down and take a look at safety? This is insane!
Hey John!
Love the videos you put out, they're always both interesting and educational!
Unfortunately, there is one thing that keeps bugging me, and that is the fact that the Scheherazade intro music snippet temporarily cuts over to mono, and only has audio on the right channel for a brief moment. A very very minor gripe, but as I do try to watch all your videos it keeps popping up and annoys me every time.
Since you are also making music yourself, I don't think it would be a major task to fix it - and it would (at least for me) put to rest that tiny annoyance that's plagued every video since the beginning.
Either way, both with and without this admittedly minor audio annoyance I do love your videos and I hope you keep it up!
As a EMT student the previous year in sioux city we discussed this in class when we got to emergency management and MCIs, also it expanded several years ago and is even bigger then before
Between that and United 232, Sioux City had plenty of practice.
Would have appreciated a bit of a run down on the characteristics of the decomposition and what the actual reactions were that took place, also a "how could it have been handled correctly"
USCSB (United States Chemical Safety Board) videos to the rescue!
Heh, was gonna also suggest looking there
The Chemical Safety Board videos are absolutely top notch. Glad to see other people suggesting them!
Since fertilizer decomposing is another way to say build a bomb, and he is based in the UK, he is very restricted in explaining how.
Fertilizer is so arousing when handled incorrectly so no
I winced as soon as the words Ammonium Nitrate were spoken. That stuff is notorious. Think of Beirut harbour, or Oklahoma City.
Texas City was one of the best examples.
At the heart of it, anyone wants you to work around nitric acid then its time to go find something else to do a long, long way away from that stuff. By itself its scary enough and people will think of all the horrible burns it can cause, but at a chemical level it turns all sorts of things into explosions, fire and death.
It's cheap, it's nitrogen, it's an oxidizer
Love your videos, wish they were longer!
Thank you!
Thank you for another great video.
Thank you!
@@PlainlyDifficult I love your little speech balloons such as "I hate my life."
Always look forward to these videos, highly educational.
Fertizers are one of those things you really dont think about much but when things go wrong they can go wrong quite spectacular
Somehow disaster videos from Plainly brighten my day. Thank you!
Good morning John, great show today my man.
I was one of those 3000 displaced by this event, the blast was strong enough to break windows over 10 miles away and topple heavy items inside of homes. We were evacuated from our school a couple hours after the blast and couldn't return home for a couple of days.
You always do such a nice job John. TYVM Well done.
Ammonium Nitrate seems to explode frequently. I've seen quite a few disaster short-docs about ammonium nitrate explosions. That gigantic explosion in Beirut in 2020 was ammonium nitrate.
The Arabs were storing it to make bombs, but forgot about it.
The history of ammonium nitrate is long and ugly. In general nitrous compounds are better left alone.
@@HansLasser Until you come up with something better and cheaper people will cont. to take the risk.
Thanks John 👍
Nice one John
Loved that deuce on the desk haha
Glad you're doing a disaster video again, you're excellent at it.
I live on the other side of the State of Iowa and I remember hearing and reading about the plant explosion a few times back in 94 but nothing since then.
As far as the legacy of it goes... Lawmakers in this state have a long history of putting production & profit over safety. It's one of the big reasons why they're been working to change the labor laws in 2023 to allow teenagers as young as 14 to work in previously prohibited places like mines, slaughterhouses, meatpacking, construction, metal working and other dangerous environments if it supposedly part of at "work-based learning program." It would also allow 16-17 year-old's to serve alcohol while allowing teens 14-18 to work as late as 9pm on school nights or 11pm during the summer. It would also allow 14 1/2 year-old's a drivers license and not just a school or learners permit.
Nice! When I get done streaming later, I'm watching this!
John is one of the best at delivering disaster / incident history as well as a fairly decent producer of music!
Stay awesome John!
Now to watch the vid!
This video very much reminds me of videos by the CSB and so my itch to hear the words "process safety management" is intense
I agree with the other posters, your grfx are great, and I appreciate the time you put into your productions. And I wasn't up on this incident, but 1994 was one the fav times of my life, and was successfully working, so I was a bit distracted.
I live in Iowa and did some rescue work at this Terra Plant...The sighyts and smells still lingter with me First Responders fire and resuce came from several counties away. It was a lot more destrucftive than the public will evfer know..
Iowan here. We don't say "balls". 🤣
Just an unholy amount of f bombs
I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska,USA, when this plant blew up.
You did not mention the increased costs of fertilizer. This after the 1993 floods. Not a good time for farmers.
I enjoyed your video. Thank you.
As usual, profits first, safety second.😮😢😮
Love these kinds videos, and love how you explain things.
Recommendation: Meat plant explosion in Booneville, Arkansas 2008, Easter day. From what I remember, no one was killed luckily.
I dont know much in the way of details sadly, as I was a kid at the time and only barely remembered some details of it.
I grew up in southeastern Iowa. I remember this explosion. I was a Sophomore in high school.
I love your channel! The background music is something else. Your work I assume?
At the time of the blast I lived in Dakota City which was approximately 2 miles west of Port Neal on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. I was in the shower when the shockwave struck. I thought a car had veered off the road and slammed into our house. I don’t remember being evacuated though however both my wife and I were gone to work by 7.
HI PD!
I really liked the video, depending on how in depth you want to go (and how long you want your videos to go for...), some potential future suggestions to make this and future videos more comprehensive:
Explore enabling conditions:
- The facility had not performed a HAZOP/PHA and the known hazards were extremely lacking (the EPA report lists 2 - oil contamination of AN -ie making ANFO and excess heating - creating thermal decomposition, there are dozens more and multiple reasons they can occur), while the maintenance strategy applied was clearly ineffective at managing facility integrity (I can't tell if it was just budget or strategy - probably both in this case).
- The EPA investigation states the DCS upgrade and scrubber installation was poorly understood by plant personnel and a management of change system was basically non-existent.
Explore in further detail the origin of the events of the day (potentially just a table of the elements and how it had happened), to effectively turn the neutraliser in to a bomb:
- The chloride contamination - the NA plant feed stream had not been sampled for 14 years prior.
- Oil contamination was potentially present in the reactor (making an ANFO mix) as contamination had occurred previously from compressor failures - the EPA wasn't able to rule this in or out.
- The use of high pressure steam actively added energy, was really stupid and not aligned with industry practice (you'd generally just waterflood or use low pressure steam, while watching instrumentation to see what was happening in the process), while the lack of flow basically made it a closed inventory.
- Explain further how these low density zones reduced activation energy and confinement effectively aided to create conditions favourable for detonation - how the event went from thermal decomposition, to deflagration, to detonation (presumably very quickly) - and how both the neutraliser and rundown tank exploded.
Explore what could have been done to reduce the likelihood of this happening:
- Management supporting and paying for a PHA, writing procedures & training
- Operators having been trained in how the plant works and how to operate the DCS
- education of key hazards to the plant & operations/maintenance personnel, with operating procedures incorporating the above.
- Improved instrumentation that functioned
- Robust management of change process
- Other operators using check valves on spargers to avert reverse flow, steam usage rules, increasing pH of AN solution before depositing it in the rundown tank, not allowing no-flow conditions to last more than a few hours etc.
Explore related events:
- The West, Texas event springs to mine as it also involved poor storage practices and sensitisation of AN (with the initiating event being very different).
USCSB videos go into such detail. Don't expect that from this channel. It's more of an overview of events with some levity mixed in. With that said, I agree with your suggestions.
@@ronbennett7885 Agreed - in this instance, I feel some of the nuance from the EPA report and the incident that occurred was lost by not peering a bit deeper, but making these videos is hard and I just want to try and provide constructive suggestions to those who are brave enough to do it (I'm certainly not!) 😄
When ur working with chemicals that also share a common use in explosives then maybe that should tell u how important safety is...
I would question a Ph figure of -1.5, unless you are dealing with weird things like pure H3SO4+ in absence of water. Apparently pure Fluorosulfuric acid (HSO3F) would be a magic acid with a PH of -20, but I don't think it can actually be synthesized (edit: I mean as pure in absence of water). Still, a PH of 1.5 would be very acidic, and quite dangerous.
Well, I've seen nitric-contaminated pretreatment wastewater streams run down to pH 0.25, so I'd believe it..
Love your videos buddy, I watch all of them and they're so cool!
İ think it was around 5 mins in the video when the narrator said pH minus 1.5 just a note but pH can never be negative it is a logarithmic scale between 1 and 14. So i assume he meant pH 1.5 and not ph negative 1.5
My dad works at mid American port Neal or something like that. Every day I think about if something were to go bad at his plant, or the fertilizer one as it did in 1994. Very scary
I live on the (ILL)inois side of the IA/IL border and I have never previously heard of this case? Although, I was only 17 in 1994- so, I'm guessing that if I did, it was of no consequence to me or I just wasn't paying attention to begin with. Which both sounds about accurate of my 17 year old attitude!! 😅 Thank you for your hard work and dedication to research and bring us the facts and details in all of these interesting cases. You do a wonderful job. Please, keep it up!! 👍🏻😁
Woodbury county is on the opposite side of the state, so it makes sense you never heard of it
In 1994 I lived in Sioux City, about 15 miles away from the plant. I remember being woken up by the blast, the windows rattling on my house and my house shaking noticeably. I had no clue what was going on at the time - I thought it might have been an earthquake or something. I worked a "2nd shift" job at the time, so 6 AM was basically the middle of the night for me. I shrugged it off and went back to sleep.
It was only later in the day that I heard about a massive explosion at the Terra plant and connected that with being shaken out of bed that morning. Being powerful enough to rattle my house and shake me awake from 15 miles away, it's no wonder this disaster makes the list of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history. I can't even imagine what it must have been like for people living nearby.
BALLS!!!! 1994? The stock footage appears to be from 1894🤣 Great video John. Mahalo🤙🏼🌴
Howdy John
Yet another tale of incompetence on a massive scale. What form of mental illness I must have, anxiously looking forward to each and every video you post, WHEEE!
I blame my father, an absolutely awesome engineer that worked with massive free span structures. And, he was a great dad, always sharing information with me, never dumbing the subject matter, making my little pre-engineering mind work. It all started when I was a wee boy. He would share a tale of incompetence, arrogance, and apathy, that would ultimately, lead to a preventable structural collapse. These stories were in a monthly engineering trade publication, whose name is lost in the clutter of my tired mind. They, like your videos, took complicated calculations and presented them in an understandable fashion.
Anyway, enough of that warm and fuzzy memory.
If you haven’t already done so, a video of the West Texas feed store ammonium nitrate explosion would be interesting. It’s a sad trail of funding cuts by the state for the needed site inspectors that would lead to the illegal storage of ammonium nitrate fertilizer by the owners of the facility. This in turn lead to the destruction of a large chunk of the town of West, and of course needless deaths.
Anyway, your content is always entertaining and informative.
Thanks!
I lived about 7 miles from Port Neal when this occurred. My classmates dad was one of the people who died. The explosion woke me up and my mom was frantically running around convinced a car had hit the house. The house sustained some minor damage. As soon as the news reported what had happened she took us kids with her when she left for work and dropped us with family in another city. I don’t remember any official evacuations being ordered but schools were shut down that day and we were told to not go outside as the air might not be safe to breathe.
Afghan veteran here, listening to your initial brief on what r get were making and the breakdown I was like “holy shit, these guys are making HME (homemade explosives)” 😂
Terrorists like ammonium nitrate because it is cheap and plentiful
I look forward to seeing your videos 📸😊 EVERY Saturday
To quote a famous caracter : It went Boom ! Big bada BOOM !
Love the image at 9:29.