COULD IT HAPPEN HERE?

There are large tank farms near every port in the US, quite often near densely inhabited places. Could a tragedy like Mexico City happen here?

Some people are worried, others are not.

As I pointed out in The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, the LNG tankers docking in Everett, Mass., some 2.5 miles from downtown Boston, each carry the energy of two hydrogen bombs. Is Sen. Edward Kennedy worried about his constituents?

Very much so. He never misses an opportunity to warn them of the horrible dangers of newkular power, genetic mutations, newkular war, and whatever else the speechwriters put in the script he is reading. However, fear of explosion of LNG in a Boston suburb does not bring the same political dividends.

Some other people do, however, worry. In 1978 the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation asked the Congressional Research Service to investigate the matter, and the resulting report, Liquefied Natural Gas: Safety, Siting, and Policy Concerns, though only the transcript of a special seminar and never approved or disapproved by the committee, is an interesting and informative background document (GPO stock no. 052-070-04566-3).

LNG is kept at - 260 degrees F, so that it will instantly freeze skin tissue; it will also explode if it mixes with air and is ignited in some sort of confinement such as a ship or a building. (Unconfined explosion is no longer believed a credible hazard.) it can also undergo a non-combustive explosion if it mixes with water, for the rapid vaporization may under certain conditions cause a blast of unheated air, though this type of freak explosion may be of more interest to the physicist than to the fireman.

By far the largest hazard, however, is just plain fire: if LNG is spilled and the vapor ignited, the resulting fire will continue to burn over the evaporating pool of liquid until all of it has evaporated; this type of fire is very difficult to control or even to contain.

Oil storage tanks are in most respects more dangerous than gas: in addition to the danger of explosion and the heat effects of fire, oil smoke could asphyxiate thousands or tens of thousands in a city. This could happen under unlikely but possible weather conditions (temperature inversion with gentle wind) -- similar to those, it so happens, that can make an uncontained nuclear meltdown dangerous. In The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, I described two such near misses for large oil fires in or near New York City, neither of which unduly disturbed the erudite nucleophobes in the New York Slimes or the other hoax kitchens in the nerve center of the Great American Brain-washing Machine.

Both points are illustrated by the case of Mississauga, a Canadian city of 340,000 west of Toronto, which hosts one of the Atomic Energy of Canada Research Communities. Afflicted with the nuclear curse, the city has twice had disaster come close in recent times:

A high-pressure pump in an oil refinery malfunctioned, causing the hydrogen line to burst; this was followed by an explosion and a large fire, but the spray systems, the refinery's private fire brigade, and the city's fire department with 17 first-line pieces of fire-fighting apparatus prevented the fire from escalating into a major disaster, so that the death toll did not rise beyond that of Three Mile Island.

The other incident took place in the memorable TMI year of 1979 and was more serious: a train carrying ammonia and other-dangerous material derailed. During the nine days of firefighting and hazardous materials handling, 250,000 people (no error: a quarter of a million people) had to be evacuated. The US press, still in a state of hysterical lunacy over TMI, took little or no notice.

The reason is again that what threatened the 250,000 evacuees was asphyxiation or poisoning, and news editors understand both of these dangers, whereas a handful of people "threatened" by low-level radiation is well beyond their wits.

Ignorance produces news and news produces ignorance: that is the engine cycle of the Great American Brainwash.