February 21, 2003
From the desk of Jane Galt:Breaking News
A barge docked at a refinery caught on fire and exploded in Staten Island. The consensus here is that it isn't terrorism -- or that if it is, the terrorists aren't too bright, which is a relief.
Posted by Jane Galt at February 21, 2003 1:42 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksAs a lifelong resident of Northern New Jersey and Philadelphia, the two centers of oil refining in the Northeast, I offer the following observation: refineries blow up every so often. When one does, there is little reason to suppose that the cause is anything other than negligence or bad luck.
I live in Houston, I believe the largest single port for petrochemical imports. We have a number of refineries and they do seem to blow up periodically. I've worked on some of the plants and I'm more surprised that they don't blow up more often. I would immediately suspect accident or negligence long before I'd suspect terrorism. The way things typically work, I'd expect terrorists to blow up the one thing in the plant that wasn't flammable...
Bolie IV
Yep, I used to live near Blue Island, Illinois, where there are a lot of chemical refineries. We had an explosion ten miles from where I lived that you could clearly hear both where I lived and quite a bit further out. The ground literally shook.
No terrorism, just an accident. But in general the industry's safety record is very good. It would have to be or they'd be losing money hand over fist.
I also live in Houston. We kind of take these explosions as ho-hum incidents. And yes, human error is usually the culprit. We sometimes have got to take a chill pill. The terrorists are not behind every tragedy.
New York has better reason that most cities to jump to the conclusion that terrorists are lurking. But this seems to be a simple accident. The local radio says one worker died; the barge which first caught fire was carrying 4 million gallons of gasoline (=100k barrels??).
They quoted one resident saying it couldn't be terrorists because they would never strike Staten Island. This sounds a little silly, but I'm confident the resident went on to say "because nobody has ever heard of it." They just didn't broadcast the whole quote [g].
Staten Island is the least populous (most suburban, if you like) of NYC's five boroughs. It's very close to New Jersey, and joined to the rest of the city only be ferry and the Verrazano Narrows Bridge (built in 1964). The NYC Marathon was set up to include parts of all five boroughs in the course, so the race actually starts on the Verrazano; so runners don't see much of Staten Island!
Speaking of fires and New Jersey, a nightclub was leveled by a pyrotechnics-induced blaze and at least 95 are believed dead:
The pyrotechnics were apparently not authorized but the building was otherwise up to code...simply amazing.
New Jersey, Rhode Island... those little East Coast states all look the same to some people...
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