Accidents Involving Ammonium Nitrate

Ammonium nitrate, both an oxidizer and a self—reactive substance, is still used in fertilizers and as a raw material for explosives. The following two are typical accidents involving ammonium nitrate. 

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No, there have been a lot of accidents involving ammonium nitrate. The first m yor one occurred in the United Kingdom, on April 2nd 1916 at an explosives factory at Faversham, in Kent, killing 120 people. A disaster at an... 

This tragedy, along with several other large-scale accidents involving ammonium nitrate explosions, finally led researchers... 

Ammonium nitrate is the most important fertilizer in the world (see p. 96). It ranked fifteenth among the industrial chemicals produced in the United States in 1995 (8 million tons). Unfortunately, it is also a powerful explosive. In 1 947 an explosion occurred aboard a ship being loaded with the fertilizer in Texas. The fertilizer was in paper bags and apparently blew up after sailors tried to stop a fire in the ship s hold by closing a hatch, thereby creating the compression and heat necessary for an explosion. More than six hundred people died as a result of the accident. More recent disasters involving ammonium nitrate took place at the World Trade Center in New York City in 1993 and at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995. 

Ammonium perchlorate and ammonium nitrate propagate detonation, while no test data on other explosive oxidizers according to standard test methods are available. Although many accidents of explosions involving chlorates in fire are known, no explosion of chlorates has taken place independently by the standard test methods 1... 

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