Oppau accident

As was Uie case in Oppau, Germany, in 1921, everyone with firstliand knowledge of the disaster was killed on the site, leaving tlie cause of the incident unknown. It is reasoned tliat a structural weakness in one of the tanks caused the gas leak, although the liquefied gas was not under any pressure. The tanks were only 3 years old when tlie accident occurred and certainly were not expected to... 

Many of the pre-teclmological-era accidents, such as tliose in Chicago (1871). Joluistown (1889), and Oppau (1921), were exacerbated by poor plamiing and construction. These accidents often resulted in the tightening of safety controls. 

A disastrous accident occurred at a BASF s plant in Oppau, Germany, with two explosions at 7 29 and 7 31 a.m. on September 21, 1921, resulting in a casualty list of 509 dead, 160 missing, and 1,952 injured. 

The cause of the accident was the blasting with dynamite of about 4,500t of a solidified mass of ammonium sulfate nitrate compound fertilizer (a double salt of ammonium sulfate and nitrate in a mole ratio of 1 2). This process had been practiced under supervision for many years, and about 30,000 blasting procedures had been experienced without accidents until the Oppau disaster. 

That autumn, in September, an event occurred that shocked chemical workers. At the basf works in Oppau two huge explosions, caused by blasting a caked mixture of ammonium sulphate and ammonium nitrate, killed several hundred workers, wounded more than 2,000 and made thousands homeless. Just before the explosion at Oppau the newspaper Proletarier had reported on a rise in accidents in the industry. Workers were inhaling poisonous gases. They wounded their eyes or burnt themselves with acids, water or steam. And then there were harmful substances seeping into their bodies... 

Another whole area I left out was ammonium nitrate explosions. This hazard was one that we seemed to have learned about in the twentieth century, with major accidents at Oppau, Germany in 1923, and in Texas City in 1947. However, there have been at least two major ammonium nitrate explosions causing multiple fatalities in the twenty-first century the Toulouse AZF explosion (France, 2001) and the West explosion (Texas, 2013). We seem to keep forgetting about the hazardous nature of ammonium nitrate, perhaps because it is such a commonplace fertilizer. 

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