Yikes. An anhydrous ammonia leak. Look at all the people fleeing!
That stuff will kill you, burning out your eyes and lungs. And it’s everywhere where agriculture is practiced. We’ve got tanks of it stored just outside of town, and whenever I’m stuck at a railroad crossing, I see the tank cars full of that stuff rolling by, and I wonder what I’d do if the train derailed right in front of me. Die, probably, painfully. I doubt that I could outrun the cloud of ammonia.
Who needs ghosts and witches and monsters when we’ve got modern industrial farming? Go ahead, read some accident reports to give yourself nightmares.
It’s the smell of jobs! (Oh, wait, did jobs smell the same in Bhopal?)
Oooooo, did someone mention chemical disasters? Feast your eyes yonder:
https://www.youtube.com/@USCSB
here be nightmares aplenty.
What we take for granted and deem “commonplace” can carry great dangers.
For sober reflection.
You think that’s bad? There is a 60’000m3 tank 3miles from me. That thing is huuuuge and scaaaary.
My dad had to start using other, more expensive, nitrogen fertilizers after it became unavailable locally. Seems it was a key ingredient for turning sudafed into something else. Stolen frequently enough to make it too much trouble to deal with.
My oldest brother almost gassed me with anhydrous ammonia when I was a kid. I was unloading a wagonload of hay while my oldest brother was coming back from applying it to the field, and as he went by the barn he decided to vent the residue left in the tank. I have no idea why he decided to do this, but the cloud of ammonia rolled right over the hay wagon, I barely got out of the way in time.
This was the same brother who, on another occasion, accidentally slapped me in the face with a chainsaw (which luckily wasn’t running the chain at that instant). I was holding up the log that he was cutting, and was standing exactly where he had told me to stand. This is what prompted my other brother to say, “He’s the sort of thing that OSHA makes you put a cage around”.
Come to think of it, he also drove a tractor over my leg once, but the ground was just soft enough that it only embedded me in the ground a bit and didn’t break any bones. It’s kind of a miracle that he never seriously injured me. Farming is pretty dangerous, and becomes more so when people aren’t paying attention to what they are doing.
Like it or not, our modern existence depends on lots of dangerous chemicals.
Just ask any chemistry major.
Or look up Derek Lowe’s blog posts in the “Things I Won’t Work With” category.
The one about chlorine trifluoride (“sand won’t save you this time”) is interesting.
This stuff is so reactive, it will “burn” bricks, sand, asbestos and everything you would normally used as protective gear. Then consider that this stuff is actually used in the semiconductor industry where it is used in cleaning and etching.
It’s everywhere where chemistry with nitrogen atoms is practiced. If the goal is transporting nitrogen in a less toxic form you could go with ammonium nitrate, but that trades toxicity for, let’s call it “excitability”. Ammonium sulfate loses nitrogen atoms per unit mass (more bulk filler, more expensive to transport), but it is far safer, and you only have to heat it up later to free the ammonia compound.
I get you mean transporting that particular chemical, not transporting nitrogen in a less toxic form.
Pressurised nitrogen is pure nitrogen, and transportable. It is a thing.
You know, you could transport urine, that’s got a fair bit in it! ;)
You can transport pure nitrogen, but if you want to actually use it in a synthesis N2 is a pretty bad thing to start with (there’s the Haber process, but now you’re just back to ammonia), and even a highly pressurized N2 tank has a lower density of nitrogen than basically any solid very small molecule with nitrogen in it.
Urea is workable for bulk transport, but from a synthesis perspective that existing CN bond is annoying. Anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate are practically the most useful two, and of the two anhydrous ammonia is safer. See: The 2020 Beirut explosion.
Anhydrous ammonia is also one of the best refrigerants. CFCs were the SAFE alternative to it in household kitchens, etc. To be fair, we didn’t know about the ozone depletion thing at the time. NH4 is still used for large scale refrigeration because of its efficiency. I once took a first aid course where the instructor was also one of the senior hazmat crew for the university (hazmat and first aid were both under Environmental Health and Safety). He said despite all the crazy stuff some of the labs had at this big research university, the thing that still worried him the most was the literal tons of anhydrous ammonia in the hockey rink. The refrigeration loop under the ice and tank locations were designed so that the heavier than air NH4 should flow away if there was ever a leak, but he pointed out that if people at rink level ever start to panic, try to escape, and then pass out, they were dead. Any rescuer team would need a hazmat suit with SCBA to get in there.
That video reminds me of the scene from the horror movie ‘The Fog’ as shown here – Water Vapor and Climate (8 minutes long.) by Greenman3610 aka Climate Denial Crock of the Week.’
@ ^Huh. Sorry. Movie s The Mist not the Fog.*
@8. John Morales : “You know, you could transport urine, that’s got a fair bit in it! ;) ”
Actually we all already do do that just in small bladder sized quantities! ;-)
.* Different movie specifically : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog
In the late-1970s to late-1980s I worked for what was, at the time, a large chemical company. One of the reports I worked on was “Chemical Intermediates for Sale”. That is, chemicals that were by-products from what the company was making that they sold to other chemical companies that went into whatever they were making. One of the compounds that got shipped in railroad tank car lots was phosgene.
I grew up on a farm, but our farm was to small-scale to use specialist equipment with anhydrous ammonia, thank Ctulhu.
.
NEWSFLASH!
Dennis Hastert, former Republican speaker of the House and sexual predator died this Saturday at 84.
Remind your local voters of him and what he did.
Addemdum.
I recall, there used to be a very relaxed attitude to herbicides and insecticides.
Apart from death by accidents -always a thing in agriculture- a lot of our neighbors died of cancer, but the cardiovascular disease deaths from the high-fat diet in a culture where hard physical labor dominated may have masked any ‘signal’ from excessive cancer as it can take decades for cancer to develop.
@DaveH #10:
It seems like it’s finally being replaced by supercritical CO2. We had a large old ammonia unit at a place I worked, you almost had to wear a gas mask when entering the compressor room. The new unit was CO2, smaller, more quiet and much, much cleaner.
@birgerjohansson,
How about Parkinson’s?
@ birgerjohansson – 6th October 2026 at 2:42 am :
Tangential but since you noted your newsflash there – also on the Infinite thread here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/09/29/infinite-thread-xxxxi/comment-page-1/#comment-2313520
Plus in #199. thanks Akira MacKenzie Jimmy Bakker and Jeffrey Archer have kicked the bucket too. An especially apt euphemism for the latter. Come on, ruie of three..
[OT]
I prefer this one: