||| FROM THE SEATTLE TIMES |||
In Ferndale, near Bellingham, another industrial tank has come under scrutiny because of serious safety concerns.
While catastrophic failures are rare, the consequences can be disastrous.
When you consider where the Cherry Point tank is situated, its obsolete design becomes even more concerning. Risk is determined not only by the probability of a failure, but also by the consequences if a failure were to occur.
The lesson from many industrial accidents is not that aging infrastructure inevitably fails. It is that communities often wait too long to replace it.
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To put things in a proper perspective, the single-walled Altagas propane tank at Cherry Point, which we can see from our deck, can hold up to 14.7 million gallons of propane. The energy of that much propane, when thoroughly combined with air and ignited, is equivalent to over 22 Hiroshima bombs. Surely (and hopefully) Altargas has detectors and measures to cope with propane leaks well before they get so severe. Otherwise, such a massive release could flatten much of Ferndale. And we’d probably feel the remnants of the resulting shock wave here on the north side of Orcas Island.
I will be looking into this danger in the near future.