McEWEN, Tenn. (AP) — The blast in rural Tennessee that leveled an explosives plant and was felt for miles around left no survivors, authorities said Saturday.
The total number of dead was unclear, as was the cause of the Friday blast. By the weekend, the devastation came into focus, with officials saying they had found no survivors. A total of 16 people were missing, officials said.
“There’s a gauntlet of emotions there,” Humphreys County Sheriff Chris Davis said during a news conference, pausing to clear his throat before he asked for prayers for the families of the victims in a shaky voice.
“We’ve recovered no survivors,” he added.
I wonder if they knew the place was gonna blow or if it was just lights out in an instant with no warning. Explosives tend to be the latter, for better or worse
A lot of explosions at similar facilities had significant warning, unfortunately. While the detonation itself tends to be instant, they usually have rules about how densely explosives are packed, fire control systems, and systems to maximize the time between problem and disaster.
They probably knew something was wrong and that it was bad, but not how bad.
This same facility had an explosion in 2014 that resulted in death. The fact that they didn’t learn from that and chose to continue to be reckless is sad and infuriating.
So I looked into it, briefly, and it looks like that incident was a different company who rented space in their complex.
That isn’t better for them now, but there’s a difference between negligence and renting to the negligent.
They ran the numbers, it’s actually cheaper to replace any equipment that gets damaged or killed.
I used to work in the oil industry, and there are old field logs from the 50s/60s where a whole crew died and the well is manned 2 days later. In the early 2000s we’d spend days on a single death or injury. Once the company paid the overtime because a guy’s wife was in labor and the contractor didn’t want to give him time off. It was addressed as a safety issue, there was no way he could concentrate safely… no issues to pay it. Sad to see the munitions industry caught in the 50s.
That depends on country tbh. And the The strange/sad thing is that I have read the DoD manuals (not American, but the DoD enforces their standars and audits foreign suppliers) and they are pretty stringent.
It’s also bad strategy to have a supply chain that is weak to episodes like this.