This morning I was adding wood to the fire and all of a sudden the whole house shook. My son and I were some what starteled and discussed what it could have been.
I just saw online that the gas powered plant acroos and up the river blew up. The report is that 2 were killed and as many as 250 injured.
It was at least 2 miles from me by the way the crow flys. I can't imagine the shock wave right there.

On a July 4th morning decades ago at my my folks house...I heard a loud bang out the 2nd floor window, which looks over the town and river. I though it was early fireworks. It turned out to have been a closed pizza parlor's propane tank in the little town across the river, a mile or two away. Killed a woman living in an apartment next door.

An old friend of mine, (an Industrial Hygienist) was just getting off a plane to inspect a nitro-glycerin processing facility. They told him to just get another flight home, as the building had just exploded earlier that morning, killing several.

Went out an got the morning Sunday paper and 28 miles North East of me there was a mountain spitting out steam. Not a big deal as it had been doing this for a few weeks. I went back in the house and began reading the Sunday paper when I noticed the neighbors all out side point at something. As I walked out side again there she was, Mt Saint Helens looking like an atomic bomb went off with a massive column heading up to the stratus fear then forming a mushroom ring at the top. The questions you need to ask yourself is: because it looks like an atomic bomb when will the shock wave hit, the heat wave or the big chunks of extremely hot rock get to you? I heard no sound nor felt any earth quakes, because the explosion was shaped towards the north. May 18th 1980 has been a while ago now but some things are still pretty fresh in my mind.
The north side of Mt Stain Helens is now a great snow kiting area, go figure.

If there can be good news from the plant explosion the number of injured is supposed to be about 100 not 250.

A house exploded in the next town over from me killing a whole family in the middle of the night last summer. Pretty scary stuff

Just to show how screwed up the media is. With the origanal report from this explosion there were as many as 250 people injured. WOW huge ratings for the news. Turns out there was only 50 people on the site at the time of the explosion due to the danger of the tests they were doing with the gas lines. So now it turns out that only about a dozen or so were injured. This is a good thing but how far will the media go to make the news more exciting? They have lost all integrity and just go for the shock value. I'm so glad we don't have TV in our house.

we had our local sugar factory blow up a few years back.... our house at the time was meh, 2 miles approx.... anyway it was loud enough to rattle the house...

the dust in the storage silos blew, i think only 1 person died... but it was crazy loud

a few pics

One of the largest explosions ever was caught on tape. This -was- the Pepcon plant just outside of Las Veags - they produced rocket fuel for the space shuttle and other military contracts. It was amazingly captured by a crew that was surveying / doing repairs on the mountain a couple miles east and south of the plant - nothing to do with the plant at all just in the right place at the right time. Downtown Vegas is to the north and west of the explosion about 15 miles. It shook buildings and broke windows in the hotels there. Just plain awesome to watch - a miracle that there was only two people killed. You can actually see the shockwave moving out from the explosion. Oh, and it blew up a marshmallow plant that was a ways away from it. Marshmallow's were found miles away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJVOUgCm5Jk