It is worth noting that none of these (very bad0 accidents came close to involving the majority of the flammable compounds stored nearby.
That such event are rare should be of significant comfort if you are worried about the dangers of transporting tankers full of benzene. In both incidents poor management and engineering contrived to make a dangerous event possible and standards were rewritten to prevent future mistakes. Another famous UK example is the Flixborough disaster caused by a fuel-air explosion caused by a leaky pipe in a cyclohexane plant. It was a huge explosion probably involving about 300 tons of fuel (but that is only about 0.1% of the fuel stored in the depot a lot of which caught fire but didn't explode). The Buncefield explosion in a UK oil storage depot was caused by one. It isn't easy to achieve this by accident with a large volume of fuel.īad maintenance and safety procedures in chemical and oil plants can lead to accidental fuel-air explosions. Largely this is because the fuel has to be dispersed at just the right concentration in the air to get a detonation or deflagration rather than a fiery but unimpressive "phut". But a quick read of how the weapons work (see this wikipedia entry) suggests that they require some fairly notable technology to get right. These are known as thermobaric bombs and the largest are just about the biggest non-nuclear explosions possible in existing military arsenals. Most motor vehicles have 40kg or so of fuel that is just as flammable as benzene but after accidents they rarely catch fire or explode and never do so with the power of a fuel air thermobaric explosion (the hollywood trope that all crashed cars explode is pure nonsense).īut big fuel air explosions are known to be possible and have been developed into some very effective military weapons. Fires and explosions happen, but rarely, and they are never known to be of the thermobaric type you are worried about. Standard automotive petrol (gasoline) for example is present in most vehicles (non-diesel ones anyway) and is transported in 40 tonne tankers on most roads. There are plenty of other, widely used, chemicals and mixtures that could, in principle, cause large explosions. The first important point to note is that benzene should not be a particular worry. I can passive read chemical formulae and make very simple calculations like above.Īll flammable organic liquids could, in principle, create large fuel-air explosions but the conditions are very hard to achieve accidentally Note: I have very limited chemical knowledge. If not is it possible to calculate what is the maximum of benzene that TheĮxplosion in Jilin in China took 1 hour so that seems to be the case. But because the explosion the rest of theīenzene will be blown into the air and possible then be again be Benzene is explosive within the explosive limits of minimum $\pu$ TNT)Ĭould all benzene explode at once? Because benzene might be mixid inĪir within the explosive limits range, but this will be only for a