Mississippi pressure vessel explosion

4-ft diameter, 2-inch-thick steel pressure vessel hydrotested with nitrogen at 2200 psi (1.5× the 1500 psi operating pressure). Door blew off, weighed 4000 lb, found half a mile away. One worker killed, one sandblasted and going blind. Used here as the setup for Charpy testing and cup-cone fracture samples.

Why do we care? I had a pressure vessel in Mississippi — 4 ft in diameter, couple inches thick steel — at the time that it blew up and killed one guy and sandblasted another guy. The door went flying off; the door weighed 4,000 lb, and it was found about a half a mile away. This thing was being pressurized at 2200 psi nitrogen. Ordinarily you would do a hydro test according to the ASME code. This was being tested before it went into service at 1.5 times the operating pressure of about 1500 psi. That's the distribution pressure if you've got natural gas coming from Texas and you want to transport it up to New Jersey so people up there have some gas. Today modern pipelines are operating at 1500 psi. Anybody have an idea what the gas pressure in your house is, if you have gas heat or hot water? It's a quarter psi. If I go in the lab and turn on the gas jet and light it — my old high school physics teacher, Captain Hood, he was captain of the Navy, he used to do that for us and get about a two-foot flame shooting out of that gas jet. That's only a quarter psi.