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Newcastle, Australia has a port facility storing between 6,000 and 12,000 tons of AN close to residential areas. Unfortunately despite calls for it to reduce t

Newcastle, Australia has a port facility storing between 6,000 and 12,000 tons of AN close to residential areas. Unfortunately despite calls for it to reduce the stockpile or move it elsewhere, it seems not much is being done. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-concern-about-newcastle-ammonium-nitrate/12527546 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-c...

ekimekim 6y ago
"Storing" needs some context here I think. It's a factory producing 385kt of AN a year, so 6-12kt is approx a week's worth of production. I don't really see how you can avoid needing that kind of buffer storage at that scale, and by all reports they're following strict safety standards. That said, that makes the real question why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.
- Tuna-Fish 6y ago
  > why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place. I don't know about this specific case, but the chronology is usually reversed. Someone gets a permit and builds a hazardous factory somewhere suitably close to a city that it has access to transportation and employees, but far enough to be safe, with adequate safety areas. Then, over time, the city needs more room and since the factory hasn't blown up yet, it seems safe enough to expand right up to it...
- VLM 6y ago
  Finally my military experience is relevant. If you've ever wondered why military ammo depots rarely blow up despite plenty of accidents and fires (at least in western cultures or specifically in the USA), a long time ago I was an Army sysadmin for a computer system devoted to keeping that safe. This wasn't a centralized control thing either, it was a distributed system. There's a minimum contact diameter and maximum distance to propagate an explosion. Even if you detonate one pallet of one ton of ANFO literally making a checkerboard of pallets would seem from memory to be enough to make sure the explosion does not propagate to the other pallets. Now realize this was decades ago and I was more or less a sysadmin not a warrant officer nor one of the research scientists who wrote the books full of regulations nor the geospatial analysis code. Yes one pallet of one ton of ANFO would make a mess of the forklift driver next to it, but, maybe 100 or 200 hundred feet away, other than maybe some broken windows you'd be hard pressed to tell it happened. One of many AN production processes generates about one part calcium carbonate (limestone, essentially) to one part AN, so you could literally alternate train cars of synthetic limestone with train car loads of AN. Bulk storage is more problematic. A pretty good analogy is forest fires. One tree chopped into segments and catches fire is a pretty cool bonfire or camp fire which is no big deal for outdoorsmen who intelligently plan ahead. You can do that a million nights in a row and nothing bad will happen. One million trees in close proximity and if one catches fire the whole forest burns down in one night, which is a huge problem.
- mdoms 6y ago
  How is this relevant from a safety perspective?
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  > by all reports they're following strict safety standards. Orica has been fined for safety breaches in the past. But even if they are doing everything right, you need to consider the context: it's surrounded by a bunch of things that can catch fire. There's a massive coal terminal, a fuel/petrol terminal, as well as a Fertiliser producer all within a few hundred meters of each other. Any one of those having a bad day and Newcastle makes state news and everyone goes to watch the fire. (Like seemingly half the country did when the Pasha Bulker freighter beached right on Nobby's Beach, a few hundred meters away). If that fire spreads, because say there's strong winds (also a common thing there) and now we have a risk of Orica's terminal going up.
Jedd 6y ago
Orica plant was commenced in 1969 -- I wonder what distance the nearest residential housing was to the site at the time. I can understand residents not wanting to be within a potential blast radius, but I don't know enough to guess at who'd be responsible for the cost of relocating a manufacturing plant if there was council approval to extend suburban zoning ever closer to the plant over the years.
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  I have family that used to own property in Stockton well before the Stockton Bridge was built in 1971. According to Wikipedia "Stockton was settled almost as soon as the foundation of Newcastle in 1797." -- so yeah, the Orica plant was definitely established well after people were living there. It's grown a bit since, but it's definitely still very much a 'beach town vibe'. Then of course there's the whole City of Newcastle right across the harbour. While the 1989 earthquake definitely resulted in the city hollowing out, when the Orica plant was built it was a vibrant and well populated.
  - Jedd 6y ago
    Great, thanks for the local insight! I'm about 130km north-west of Newcastle now, so relatively safe from any immediate effects. In Sydney, under the Mascot (main international airport) flight paths, you've got people who purchased property in the last couple of decades insisting that curfew hours be increased, flight paths be changed, etc -- despite the airport operating for 80+ years, and at no time in the past century has anyone thought air travel would decrease in popularity (2020 notwithstanding). I get that some people buy into areas expecting change / no change, but I'm very wary of people's causality inversion fields getting in the way of historical accuracy. If Orica's been there for 51 years now, how many local residents turned up since they 1969 vs after 1969?
- guerby 6y ago
  Same thing for the AZF disaster in Toulouse, France: when the plant was created it was in the middle of fields. Fast forward in time and the surroundings of the plant became completely urbanized at the time of the explosion. I remember my physics teacher talking about the AZF plant risk and urbanization circa 1990 so twenty years before the explosion (I'm from the Toulouse area), so everyone knew there too.

ekimekim 6y ago

"Storing" needs some context here I think. It's a factory producing 385kt of AN a year, so 6-12kt is approx a week's worth of production. I don't really see how you can avoid needing that kind of buffer storage at that scale, and by all reports they're following strict safety standards. That said, that makes the real question why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.

Tuna-Fish 6y ago
> why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place. I don't know about this specific case, but the chronology is usually reversed. Someone gets a permit and builds a hazardous factory somewhere suitably close to a city that it has access to transportation and employees, but far enough to be safe, with adequate safety areas. Then, over time, the city needs more room and since the factory hasn't blown up yet, it seems safe enough to expand right up to it...
VLM 6y ago
Finally my military experience is relevant. If you've ever wondered why military ammo depots rarely blow up despite plenty of accidents and fires (at least in western cultures or specifically in the USA), a long time ago I was an Army sysadmin for a computer system devoted to keeping that safe. This wasn't a centralized control thing either, it was a distributed system. There's a minimum contact diameter and maximum distance to propagate an explosion. Even if you detonate one pallet of one ton of ANFO literally making a checkerboard of pallets would seem from memory to be enough to make sure the explosion does not propagate to the other pallets. Now realize this was decades ago and I was more or less a sysadmin not a warrant officer nor one of the research scientists who wrote the books full of regulations nor the geospatial analysis code. Yes one pallet of one ton of ANFO would make a mess of the forklift driver next to it, but, maybe 100 or 200 hundred feet away, other than maybe some broken windows you'd be hard pressed to tell it happened. One of many AN production processes generates about one part calcium carbonate (limestone, essentially) to one part AN, so you could literally alternate train cars of synthetic limestone with train car loads of AN. Bulk storage is more problematic. A pretty good analogy is forest fires. One tree chopped into segments and catches fire is a pretty cool bonfire or camp fire which is no big deal for outdoorsmen who intelligently plan ahead. You can do that a million nights in a row and nothing bad will happen. One million trees in close proximity and if one catches fire the whole forest burns down in one night, which is a huge problem.
mdoms 6y ago
How is this relevant from a safety perspective?
paranoidrobot 6y ago
> by all reports they're following strict safety standards. Orica has been fined for safety breaches in the past. But even if they are doing everything right, you need to consider the context: it's surrounded by a bunch of things that can catch fire. There's a massive coal terminal, a fuel/petrol terminal, as well as a Fertiliser producer all within a few hundred meters of each other. Any one of those having a bad day and Newcastle makes state news and everyone goes to watch the fire. (Like seemingly half the country did when the Pasha Bulker freighter beached right on Nobby's Beach, a few hundred meters away). If that fire spreads, because say there's strong winds (also a common thing there) and now we have a risk of Orica's terminal going up.

Jedd 6y ago

Orica plant was commenced in 1969 -- I wonder what distance the nearest residential housing was to the site at the time. I can understand residents not wanting to be within a potential blast radius, but I don't know enough to guess at who'd be responsible for the cost of relocating a manufacturing plant if there was council approval to extend suburban zoning ever closer to the plant over the years.

paranoidrobot 6y ago
I have family that used to own property in Stockton well before the Stockton Bridge was built in 1971. According to Wikipedia "Stockton was settled almost as soon as the foundation of Newcastle in 1797." -- so yeah, the Orica plant was definitely established well after people were living there. It's grown a bit since, but it's definitely still very much a 'beach town vibe'. Then of course there's the whole City of Newcastle right across the harbour. While the 1989 earthquake definitely resulted in the city hollowing out, when the Orica plant was built it was a vibrant and well populated.
- Jedd 6y ago
  Great, thanks for the local insight! I'm about 130km north-west of Newcastle now, so relatively safe from any immediate effects. In Sydney, under the Mascot (main international airport) flight paths, you've got people who purchased property in the last couple of decades insisting that curfew hours be increased, flight paths be changed, etc -- despite the airport operating for 80+ years, and at no time in the past century has anyone thought air travel would decrease in popularity (2020 notwithstanding). I get that some people buy into areas expecting change / no change, but I'm very wary of people's causality inversion fields getting in the way of historical accuracy. If Orica's been there for 51 years now, how many local residents turned up since they 1969 vs after 1969?
guerby 6y ago
Same thing for the AZF disaster in Toulouse, France: when the plant was created it was in the middle of fields. Fast forward in time and the surroundings of the plant became completely urbanized at the time of the explosion. I remember my physics teacher talking about the AZF plant risk and urbanization circa 1990 so twenty years before the explosion (I'm from the Toulouse area), so everyone knew there too.