Nai Commentary

[rix_scaedu]

 I may have to upgrade my asessment of the fire in Nai  at the moment.

This could be my model....

Comments

[kengr]

You should check out Harry Turtledove's "The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump" :-)

More legitimately, you might drop by your local Fire Department, and ask if the HazMat folks can spare some time. Explain that you are writing a story and want to have a nasty warehouse fire.

If they've got the time, they can give you all *sorts* of fun ideas.

Years back I grabbed a discontinued reference book for the Fire safety track at the college bookstore. It was a combo of 4 manuals listing things like hazardous chemical reactions (like the "oops" when one company *thought the tank on a tank truck was mild steel and filled it with concentrated sodium hydroxide. It was aluminum, and the NaOH reacted to strip the oxide coat which let the aluminum react with the water in the solution producing lots of hydrogen and heat. The truck caught fire...)

Another section explained the "hazard diamond" and listed the ones for a large number of chemicals.

Very useful stuff for plotting "bad things".

[sauergeek]

There are no shortage of articles about particularly spectacular industrial failures, including explosions. I am put in mind of Derek Lowe's blog In the Pipeline, particularly the "How Not To Do It" section, and specifically his post on the massive explosion at a BASF fertilizer plant in Oppau, Germany in 1921.

Another fine source is after-event reports produced by investigators into those disasters. Again from "In the Pipeline", there is a post about a smaller-scale explosion in Florida in 2007, which includes a link to the investigation report produced by the federal Chemical Safety and Hazard Board detailing what went wrong.

[lilfluff]

*wanders in a year in the future*

The PEPCON explosion mentioned on the linked Wikipedia page of largest non-nuclear explosions has always been a big one in my mind owing both to the connection with the Challenger disaster and because it was unintentionally caught on camera which meant it's been shown on a number of programs. That the first time I heard about it was on a program that mentioned one of the two deaths was an employee who chose to remain at his office and call every other office to tell others to evacuate also played a role in my remembering it.