The Bad News Continues
Tianjin blasts: evacuations ordered as sodium cyanide is found. The official death toll is over 100 with hundreds more injured.
In addition to sodium cyanide officials now know that calcium carbide, potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate were stored in the warehouse in large quantities. The nitrates can be used in fertilizers, but they are also used to make gunpowder and explosives. The Oklahoma City Federal Building was blown up with a truckload of nitrate fertilizer. Calcium carbide reacts with water to create acetylene gas which is used in welding and cutting metal. Sodium cyanide is a fine powder which can kill you if you breathe it or ingest it. If it gets mixed with water or is burned it produced hydrogen cyanide gas. Zyklon B was the trade name of hydrogen cyanide gas in World War II Germany and it was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of inmates in Nazi concentration camps.
Those four chemicals are dangerous as individuals, and they should never be stored in close proximity. You don’t use water to control a fire when any of them is present.
4 comments
Omg. That’s more than horrible. How on earth can they clean that shit up without dumping it somewhere else where people will die?
You clean it up wearing ‘spacesuits’ and shoveling it into barrels and burying it in a desert. If it leaks into the ground water people will die; if it gets in the air people will die. They put together four chemicals that are made worse by fire or water – the two methods most commonly used clean up or neutralize problems.
Here in the US that building would have HazMat signs all over it to tell firefighters to not use water if it catches on fire. In China, though, it’s the Wild West. Environmental regulations make the Free Market Fairy cry, after all :(.
Well, unless it was in West Texas, then you couldn’t tell the difference. 😈