New London School

18 March, 1937 was an ordinary day at the New London School in Texas. Some of the students were grumbling that they were suffering from headaches but otherwise everything was as it should be.

After lunch, there was a class in carpentry. The teacher introduced the afternoon’s topic to the gathered students and then pressed the switch of an electric sander.

When the sander came on, the motor sparked. This spark ignited such a powerful natural gas explosion that the roof of the school was blasted up from the supporting walls. The roof then crashed downward and destroyed the building. Of the 600 students and 40 teachers in the school, just 130 avoided injury. Over 300 were killed.

Just a few months before, the school board had canceled the natural gas contract. Instead, as was common practice in the area, the board decided to save money by arranging for plumbers to siphon off gas from the local gasoline company’s residue pipeline.

Disastrously, the gas from this line leaked into the confined crawlspace that ran under the school. From there, it worked its way into the classrooms. This why the students had suffered headaches – the gas was steadily driving the air from the building. Nobody took the complaints of the students seriously, though, and certainly no-one considered the possibility of a gas leak causing headaches.

Cleveland, Ohio

On Friday, 20 October, 1944, a series of explosions and fires tore through an area of one square mile in Cleveland, Ohio. The first detonation occurred at around 2:30 in the afternoon. A vapor started to seep from the side of an above ground storage tank belonging to the East Ohio Gas Company. A wind blowing in from Lake Erie then blew this vapor into the street gutters where the vents for the sewerage system were located.

Having blended with air, the natural gas vapor now merged with the gas in the sewers and exploded. Flames burst upward, roaring out of ventilation shafts and tearing covers from manholes.

The sudden and frightening violence of the explosion terrified local residents, but they believed that the worst was over and did not evacuate their homes. Just a few minutes later, however, a natural gas storage tank adjacent to the one that had leaked burst into flames and razed the entire tank storage facility. This was followed by a succession of explosions and fires that drove flames through the drainage system and right into people’s homes. 130 people died, and many buildings were either blown to pieces or burned down.

Ronan Point

On 11 March 1968, builders put the finishing touches to a new prefabricated tower block called Ronan Point in West Ham, an area of London. Residents began to settle into the apartments, and one of these new occupiers was a lady called Ivy Hodge who had moved into a corner flat on the 18th floor. Early on the morning of 16 May 1968, just two months after Ronan Point opened, Ivy struck a match to light her cooker. The flame of the match ignited a leak of natural gas, causing an explosion that ripped out a corner of the building. Ivy miraculously survived but four others were killed and seventeen injured.

Abbeystead

In 1984, at Abbeystead in the United Kingdom, there was local concern about a scheme to pump water over a dam to adjust the flow of the river Wyre. On 23 May, 44 people gathered in the valve house of the dam to hear the water authority discuss the purpose of the scheme and to witness a demonstration of the pumping process.

Unknown to anyone, during the 17 days prior to the meeting, methane gas had gathered in a tunnel through which the water to the valve house was set to flow. When the pumping began and the water ran out of the tunnel, the methane came with it and mixed with the air. This created a highly flammable atmosphere in a building where the visitors were free to smoke. The gas immediately exploded, killing 16 people and injuring the remainder.

Piper Alpha

The Piper Alpha disaster of 6 July 1988 was the world’s worst offshore tragedy. Of the 229 workers on this North Sea oilfield production platform, just 62 survived.

The causes of this appalling loss of life were two explosions, the first of which occurred when a natural gas condensate leaked under the Piper Alpha platform and caught fire. A second enormous explosion followed when the flames from the first melted part of a gas pipeline.

Astonishingly, the fire continued to be fed for two hours by gas pumped through a pipeline from an adjacent oil platform, the Tartan. The gas stopped only when this line broke apart.

Hutchinson

Hutchinson is a city in Reno County, Kansas, and the site in January 2001 of a massive and deadly migration of compressed natural gas.

The source of the gas was the Yaggy storage field. From here, the gas squeezed through underground fissures and erupted on the surface in 15 separate blowholes. The explosions continued over two days, killing two people at a mobile home park, demolishing two businesses, and damaging a further two dozen or so shops and offices. Hutchinson authorities ordered a partial evacuation, and experts were called in to identify any other gas leaks across the city.

All of these events have now passed into history, but they remain in our minds as a reminder of the destructive power of methane gas.

…or is it so surprising when you realize the impact methane gas has on our daily lives?

General chemical facts

• Methane is a colorless, odorless flammable gas.
• It is the simplest member of the alkane series of hydrocarbons (a compound of hydrogen and carbon).
• Its chemical formula is CH4.

These are the basics. They’ll show the professor that you’ve at least done your standard homework! But how about some more detail?

Other chemical facts

• Melting point: – 296.5ºF
• Boiling point: – 258.88ºF
• Molecular shape: tetrahedral
• Related alkanes: ethane and propane
• Related compounds: chloromethane; formaldehyde; formic acid; methanol.

With these chemical facts out of the way, we can turn to a more practical issue – avoiding the dangers that methane poses.

Safety

Being colorless, odorless and flammable, is a scary combination.  There is no obvious way to detect and identify methane without the use of sophisticated instruments.  Devices for methane detection rage from simple alarms that sound when dangerous levels of methane are detected, to high-end laser gas detectors that provide real time gas analysis, alarms and data logging.

Despite these dangers, methane is widely used in residential, commercial and industrial environments. This extremely powerful gas is carefully monitored and controlled using pipelines, tanks and methane gas detection equipment.

Natural gas

• Methane is the main constituent (about 97% by volume) of natural gas.
• As natural gas, methane has an energy content of 1000 BTU/standard cubic foot and appears in millions of homes and businesses for the purposes of heating and cooking.

Other uses

• Methane is burned in steam boilers and gas turbines to generate electricity.
• In the form of compressed natural gas, methane is an environmentally-friendly vehicle fuel.
• Industrial uses include the production of methanol, acetic acid, acetic anhydride, acetylene and hydrogen.

Sources One origin of methane gas is a ruminant animal – a cow or sheep, for example – but the main sources are easier to manage! Natural gas fields… In such a field, the gas is formed by the anaerobic decay (without oxygen) of organic matter. Some of these underground natural gas deposits are vast. Landfill sites…where organic waste is rotting. Biogas… This is created when organic matter such as farm manure ferments without oxygen. Methane hydrates and clathrates… These are blends of water and methane resting on the floor of the sea in a state similar to ice. These huge fields of methane are likely to be used more frequently in the future. Coal beds… Sometimes methane is extracted from deposits of coal.

Because methane is so prevalent, it is reasonable to suppose that it has an effect on our environment. And indeed it does.

The environment

• Taken over a period of 100 years, methane gas has a warming effect on the earth 25 times greater than the same amount of carbon dioxide. There is 220 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, however, than methane.
• Nonetheless, after spending seven years in the atmosphere, half of the methane converts to water – and carbon dioxide.
• The concentration of methane in the atmosphere is larger in the northern hemisphere because the majority of the natural and human sources are here.
• Scientists have recently identified that living plants (including forests) send millions of tons of methane into the atmosphere each year.
• Some scientists now believe that methane may have caused more than one-third of global warming since pre-industrial days.

Beyond our world, scientists have evidence that there are significant deposits of methane.

Extraterrestrial methane

• NASA is studying the use of methane as a fuel for rockets. The point of this research is to enable spacecraft to refuel with methane from planets such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

What this space-age methane may be called remains to be seen. Here on earth, there are various alternative names.

Synonyms of methane

• Biogas
• Fire damp
• Marsh gas
• Natural gas
• R 50

Whatever the name, the above facts about methane will, we hope, impress your biochemistry professor or anyone else you feel should know about them. More seriously, these individual snippets of information together create a picture of a gas that helps drive our economy and improve our lives. But methane is also a gas that must be controlled and monitored. The BPA Laser Methane Gas Detector helps you do just that.

Methane gas is rated as extremely flammable. In terms of scientific Risk Phrase coding it is known as an R12 gas and must be treated with the greatest care. This potential to explode is most likely when methane mixes with air to a level of just 5 – 15%. The actual combustion process then happens very quickly – in a few milliseconds.

Put simply, the reaction is as follows.

Methane Explosions in the Form of Natural Gas

Methane forms around 97% of the gases and chemicals in natural gas, a product that is distributed across the world to satisfy our demand for fuel. The risk of an explosion happening somewhere along the vast and complex distribution routes is significant. Obviously there are stringent safety measures in place, but the pipelines that are buried are subject to corrosion and excavation damage, and those that run across the earth are vulnerable to accidents and vandalism. Incidents will almost inevitably occur, and in the past ten years in the United States alone, there have been six major pipeline leaks and explosions, resulting in deaths and serious property damage.

For many years in houses, schools and businesses leaks were particularly hazardous because no-one could smell natural gas – it was odorless. Only after a series of dreadful explosions and appalling loss of life, as in the New London School disaster of 1937, did the gas companies introduce foul-smelling but harmless chemicals into the pipelines so that a leak could at least be recognized and a building evacuated.

Storage of natural gas has also proved to have serious problems. For example, leaking natural gas storage tanks caused the cataclysmic Cleveland incident of 1944 when a square mile of the city was devastated by explosions above and below ground.

Current methane detection procedures lower the risk of natural gas explosions.

Methane Found in Coal Beds

It’s unavoidable… methane gas in coal mines. The gas lies in underground seams, and as the miners tear the coal from the face of the rock, methane is released into the tunnels.

Hundreds of mining fatalities occur every year. According to official figures, the death rate in China among working miners in 2006 was 4,746; in the United States, where safety considerations are far more advanced than developing countries, the number of miners killed while underground was 47.

It is a terrible and sad fact that the history of coal mining is a story of lives lost through methane explosions or methane suffocation.

Present Danger and How to Limit Risk

The risk of methane gas explosions is not, unfortunately, confined to history. The facts described here relating to natural gas, garbage-produced methane and coal mining speak for themselves. . The technology for prevention is here. Those who do not use the tools available will be at fault for future explosions. The most advanced technology for reducing methane explosion risk is the BPA Laser Methane Gas Detector. Click on the orange button to receive a free video, price list, PowerPoint presentation and user’s manual. The hand held laser gun instantly analyzes methane levels as low as 10 ppm, and works from a distance of up to 500 feet. It is the latest advancement in methane detection that is widely available as an off the shelf product.