If the Fort McMurray fire hits the oil sands refinery there, it will cause a 14-km wide blast!

[NickB79]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36235175

There is also concern about oil facilities, particularly near Nexen's Long Lake oil extraction site.

"We're looking at a blast area of about 14 kilometres if that plant were to go," said Sgt Jack Poitras.

That's nuclear warhead territory there!

[uncle ray]

1. an area of 14km is not 14 km wide. nt.

[truebluegreen]

3. So it's all good then.

[NickB79]

7. Ah, thanks for the correction. nt

[HooptieWagon]

2. I think they mean 14 sq km, not 14 km wide.

And it's probably a worst case scenario, assuming a 100% efficiency of combustion. It will be much less.

[csziggy]

6. That is still an immense area

1 Square Kilometer = 247.105381 Acres

240 acres is huge. My farm is 60 acres and measures a half mile long and 330 yards wide so 240 acres is a half mile by 990 yards, over a half mile wide.

14 square kilometers = almost 3460 acres, over 5 sections (5.4+). A section is 1 square mile, so they are talking about a blast area of about 2.25 square miles or over 1.5 million square feet.

The West Fertilizer Plant Explosion severely damaged structures 2000 feet from the blast (http://www.csb.gov/file.aspx?DocumentId=732) - that's not even half a mile away. The blast they are talking about would encompass an area at least four time larger.

The Texas City Refinery explosion occurred on March 23, 2005, when a hydrocarbon vapor cloud exploded at the ISOM isomerization process unit at BP's Texas City refinery in Texas City, Texas, killing 15 workers and injuring more than 170 others.

The pressure wave was so powerful it shattered windows off site up to a distance of three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km) away. An area estimated at 200,000 square feet (19,000 m2) was burned.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_Refinery_explosion#Explosion

[Igel]

8. So worst case would have a blast diameter of 2.6 mi.

1.3 mi radius. Yeah, that's large.

I don't know what "blast radius" means here, though. Is it the size of the fireball, i.e., the area burned? The size where all buildings are leveled? Or just where windows are broken?

I want to assume it's the area set on fire. I don't know what definition this Canadian spokesman's using, though, or how precise he wanted us to think his figures were.

But 14 sq km is nothing like blast radius of 4.2 miles (14 km diameter), as mistakenly assumed by one poster. That wouldn't cover an area of 5 1/2 sq miles but an area of 222 sq miles.

[PeoViejo]

4. Just a taste of what the beginning of Nuclear Winter would be like.

Something to think about.

I feel for the Wildlife caught-up in this tragedy.

[Warpy]

5. Canadian friends have been told that the concentration of petroleum

in the so called oil sands is so low that it would take a nuke to combust any of it and the fire might endanger buildings and equipment but not what the people there are digging up. Refining into usable products is done elsewhere.

Yeah, I thought so, too.

I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between environmental Armageddon and the vision of a few burnt out trucks and no other damage.

[Igel]

9. It says it's the refinery that would do the damage as it exploded.

Most of the oil sands oil is exported for refinery. Hence the pipeline they wanted to build and all the rail cars we keep hearing about.

Not building the pipeline keeps prices up and makes putting refineries nearby more likely, instead of using pre-existing facilities in, say, Houston or NJ.