From Geekosystem: [This is a must watch video / safe for work]
On Wednesday, thousands of Springfield, Ohio residents were left without power when a 275-foot smokestack being demolished fell the wrong way, knocking down two 12,500 volt power lines and crushing “several pieces of power equipment,” including a building that stored backup generators.
According to the demolition company that handled the work at the former Ohio Edison Mad River Power Plant (not a nuclear power plant –Ed.), the explosives detonated correctly, “but an undetected crack on the south side of the tower pulled it in a different direction. ‘Nobody’s happy with things that go wrong in life, and sometimes it’s out of our hands and beyond anybody’s prediction. … We’re all extremely thankful no one was injured,’ Kelly told The Columbus Dispatch.”
Watch the video below:
I can think of many metaphors for what this wayward tower represents: politics, the economy, and climate change come to mind. Anyone think of some specific metaphors…?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If it was just a crack, why are the blasters saying “oh, no” after the first couple of bangs and before the second couple of bangs? They knew something wasn’t right before the tower collapsed the wrong way.
Corollary #167 to Part II, subsection (a) of Murphy’s Law:
“Murphy was an optimist.”
I’ve used similar metaphors with climate models before, at Judith’s and Keith’s. Climate scientists like to pretend that unknowns have little to no impact on their predictions. Here is a very graphic demonstration of how moronic that way of thinking is.
The only thing that comes to mind is Murphy’s Law.
No comment on the metaphors. However, here’s another implosion that went wrong: The Zip Feed Mill, in Sioux Falls, SD, on Dec 3, 2005.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7118529355131061026#
This is what happens when you use Mannian math and explosives. 🙂
Safe for work? Safety at work?
I seems to me that something was wrong, very wrong with the delay pattern. I suspect a miss fire or two. It was also strange that a charge fired after the stack was down.
More cialis please
Doh!
If they didn’t know the crack was there BEFORE the blast, how do they know there was an “undetected crack” after it got blasted in a million pieces?
It’s fun discovering “evidence” that exonerates you after the fact.
“Fell the wrong way? Not our fault. It was an undetected crack.”
“Earth doomed? Not our fault. It was/is CO2.”
“Trust us. We’re the experts. We know what we’re doing.”
My wife calls it (especially working with pre-schoolers,) ,that is ,”The Teletubby oh-oh.”
moment.” When something has gone terribly wrong….
were those children counting down??? Were those children calculating the blast???
notice the delay between zero and the first blast and then the second blast… someone F’ed up and bad, oh well at least no one was hurt.
Ben
Ummm, hmmm… Let’s see, high explosives… okay, when I think “High explosives”, for some strange reason, the first thing that comes into my head is not “let’s add kids!”
Maybe I’m just strange….
Well, when a hockey stick has a crack, you’re never quite sure how it’s going to break, either. Will it be the blade or the shaft?
I’m not buying the “undetected crack” excuse, but given the delayed and disorganized retreat from the firing point, it is a minor miracle that no one was taken out by the flailing power lines. One hopes these folks had a good bonding company, because it certainly appears that they’re in for a substantial financial reaming.
Hmmm…This is not Springfield OH,…it’s Springfield, state of Simpson’s… Just shows how
natural the animations are nowadays… Actually the animators are working on a “cloned”
animated Universe 1.0 until the end of time…If the real universe is not sustainable enough…
For some reason I’m having trouble linking this one to AGW, metaphorically or whatever.
Is anyone else puzzled by the sudden detection of the undetected crack? You gotta figure, they had some time to look at the thing while it was standing. Months, maybe? And then there were maybe 7 seconds between detonation and it falling the wrong way, at which point the whole dang thing became one huge mass of easily detected cracks. Everyone in the area seemed to be running and screaming; someone must have really had their wits about them to detect that crack in all the confusion.
Thanks for sharing the video though. Pretty exciting stuff!
It is rather telling of the level of expertise exhibited that the child present at the firing point was the one who first realized that they all needed to “get out of Dodge”. What she was doing there in the first place is another rather serious question.
Try to hide that decline!
I think the contractor hired to do the demolition was unqualified at best and clueless at worst. Why else would they have allowed people watching the event to stand underneath power lines that could come down on top of them if things didn’t go down as planned. A very simple risk analysis would have shown there could be a problem.
Ben Hillicoss says:
November 12, 2010 at 6:22 pm
notice the delay between zero and the first blast and then the second blast… someone F’ed up and bad, oh well at least no one was hurt.
The split between the two blasts did not peak my senses. What did was: at 00:59 into the video, after the tower was down, the power lines were down…. there was what seemed to be a third blast. Is it possible a charge failed to go off, that failed charge caused the wrong direction of fall, and then the charge ultimately did go off?
Good enough for government work 🙂
I don’t think the last explosion after the stack was down was a charge…….I think it was the power line coming in contact with something and causing an arc and associated boom. You could see the flash through the dust cloud I think.
This reminds me of the Challenger disaster. Back in the 1980’s experts convinced themselves the space shuttle was so safe that it made sense to add an ordinary public-school teacher to the space shuttle’s crew, because it was sure to generate lots of good publicity for the space program. Here a local set of demolition experts convinced themselves that blowing up the tower was so safe that it would be “fun” to have local children participate. Digging deeply into the motives of those who allowed the children to participate would also — almost certainly — find a desire to generate positive publicity. The Challenger publicity stunt literally blew up in the politicians’ faces — high in the sky for everyone to see on world-wide TV. Whoever set up this child-oriented tower demolition was more lucky; no one was hurt. It could easily, however, have been a lot worse: Suppose that countdown group of children had been standing directly under the electric power lines when the tower hit the ground?