Cleveland LNG explosion

Cited as the prototypical historical LNG disaster — a tank failure in the late 1940s destroyed a substantial portion of Cleveland, Ohio, and remains findable in public sources (in contrast to the Qatar event).

Such big fireballs have happened. Has anybody ever heard of any with liquefied natural gas? In the late '40s, if you look up LNG explosions, you'll see they wiped out a fair-sized amount of Cleveland, Ohio, when a tank of LNG blew up in the late '40s. There's another one that you will not find if you Google it. They blew up the entire harbor in Qatar in the Persian Gulf when a tank of LNG exploded, back about thirty years ago. That one has been sort of quieted down. Shell designed the steel tank for holding the LNG, and they did it to 1940s specs — only they built this in the 1970s or '80s, and it was a brittle fracture. We knew a lot about brittle fracture, but they were using a 1940s API spec to build it, and it had tremendous welding defects, lousy steel, everything built to a British standard. They blew up the harbor and killed a lot of people.