Buncefield destroys 101 Vampire

Hey Austin we found you a GS chassis.....

Steve

Holy smeg, what a mess. Shots like that bring home what a disaster the event would have been had it taken place when the business park was busy.

On or around Wed, 21 Dec 2005 10:26:27 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:

bummer. and that was 25 yards outside the perimeter fence, and appears to have been melted. Yikes.

the next-door building seems to have suffered rather a lot too.

Tyres are intact, and there are no local signs of fire damage - the background trees are green.

Could still be a go-er.

Not nice though, not nice at all.

Steve

Not melted - blasted away. A bit like taking a blowtorch to your head in a gale - blow your hair clean off - leave rest of head fairly unscathed.

Was talking to a chap earlier who reckons the initial blast lasted less than 5 seconds - he also said that a bomb blast calculated to take out half of Iraq would be in the region of a quarter of a second

- scary!

Mother wrote: .

. Wonder what kind of kilo-tonnage it represented - it did register at 3 on the Richter scale at a site 17 miles away.

Steve

Scary image,

Just looking at the Christmas tree on the margin of the 101 site, can't get this carol out of my head now.... Noel, noel, noel, noel, born is the king of ...

On or around Wed, 21 Dec 2005 14:57:26 +0000, Steve Taylor enlightened us thusly:

yeah, but it's the body that was unusual, and that's the bit that's been destroyed. Does birmabright burn?

Dammit. I hadnt noticed that until you pointed it out!

Top marks that man. I've been using that image for 30 odd years now and almost everyone fails to understand it :-)

On or around Wed, 21 Dec 2005 18:19:09 +0000, Mother enlightened us thusly:

Oh, I understood it. I declined to comment though.

Hummalongamenow......

It'll be gone in the morning though, until you read this thread again.

Aluminium just melts, i think the Magnesium in Birmabright will burn though.

Alex

Is there a way to view the 'random images' on the site apart from closing and opening it all the time?

All metals will burn if you get them hot enough.

DaveP

Melting point of Aluminum: 660 degC Boiling pint of Aluminium: 2519 degC Combustion temp of Aluminium: 3826 degC Temperature of the Sun: 5500 degC

I don't think Buncefield got quite that hot....

Alex

All it would take is for the battery to end up shorted directly across a body panel for that to happen - $UNGODLY Amps will cause ally to heat quite nicely - also Birmabright has a magnesium component which drops the ignition point a good bit - magnesium itself can be set off with a match and it exceeds the ignition point of aluminium when it burns.

It *could* have happened - probably just melted though - if the ally had gone up it would have done some much nastier things to the chassis - like melt it to slag.

There's a name for burning aluminium near a rusty steel chassis.

Thermite.

P.

Looks like simple blast damage to me look at what is left of the hedge behind it. Anything smaller than and inch or so has been stripped away, leaving just the sturdier branches.

Remember this wasn't a high explosive derived explosion but a relatively slow combustion of a vapour/air mix producing a big fire ball that pushed away the surrounding air as it expanded. The result isn't a shock wave but an actual massive movement of air.