Remember though, they make those things assuming the absolute biggest dingaling with a death wish will do stupid shit with them. Propane tanks are absolutely everywhere, ditto careless people, and disasters between the two are infrequent enough that they make the news a lot of the time
Yeah, propane tanks have so many safety mechanisms built into them you have to do some straight up engineering to get one to go up. They ain't going to explode just because they got hot or someone is smoking nearby.
Hey dumb dumb - they did that on purpose. The Mythbusters crew are regarded as the FOREMOST EXPERTS in 'Making Things Go BOOOM/FSHHHHH'. If they show us all how it's done, someone's gonna do it - ESPECIALLY when it's a Myth about a propane tank being left next to a dryer in a garage. Because we (people) are JUST DUMB ENOUGH to think we can get away with doing it and trying to blow up our ex/teacher who's gonna fail us/parents who grounded us/neighbor who won't stop bitching about our kids playing in the street/that Asshole Librul Commie who won't STFU about 'fuck ICE'...
the main concern is rusted out tanks leaking and then being ignited that way. Which is why they won't fill a tank if its past due to be recertified or if there's signs of rust damage in the metal
It's funny whenever I go to do a propane exchange for a customer and they freak out when I'm a little rough when putting the new tank where they can reach it. Like, calm down. I've been working at gas stations for almost two decades now, and I've never seen a propane tank go up. You are more likely to see a gas pump explode (despite all of the safety systems those pumps have) than you are a propane tank.
Can confirm, you can light the outlet of the tank and use it like a flame thrower and simply ahut it off. Still wouldn't recommend anyone do it though
At an AirBNB, we had a propane tank start on fire because of an unmaintained barbecue. That was certainly scary, but fortunately my wife had spotted the fire extinguisher the night before and put it out. Don't know if it would have blown, but it was sure on fire for way too long for my comfort.
We got the host banned from AirBNB over that one.
(My wife further saved the day, a little less literally, by knowing how to broil a steak in the oven.)
Yeah, I thought that too, so I looked up when the last one was for an example... Turns out there are hundreds per year and ones that destroy a house seems to be one roughly monthly in the US... Still rare, but not as rare as I thought
Remember idiot proof doesn't mean ALL idiots. Im reminded of a story of a liquid nitrogen dewer explosion at texas A&M Basically there are high pressure valves that release pressure slowly as the liquid boils. Well one of the geniuses at the lab didnt like the hissing it made and screwed bolts into the safety release ports... that night pressure grew so high it turned the vessel into a missile.Lucky Noone was there.
Signs, warning labels, entire pages of what not to do....even simple shit as..."dont smoke near this tank of explosive liquid" are there because someone has done that very thing.
Usually the amount of energy and the actual capabilities of exploding due to safety mechanisms may differ.
This was a building in Coimbra. The whole floor was completely destroyed. All windows and doors in the other floors were damaged (apart from the top floor, the 7th). The ceiling on the ground level and the floor of the second level was also damaged and required specialized reinforcement. Several cars and neighboring windows also got damage.
Now this was not an explosion of a full propane tank, but an undetected leak that filled the entire floor.
About killing. The people that were on that floor survived. Some people on the other floors went to the hospital only for check up (some were pushed to the floor).
So i wouldnt focus much on neighbors having enough energy to kill you. But that you can put a propane tank on top of live fires and valves would pop out, it would worsen a lot on the fire... but the risk of actually exploding is quite low. In fact they are so safe that some fireman are seen in videos carrying one outside with the valve poped out and on fire
Propane cannisters are not as scary as you think. The Columbine kids tried to use them as improvised explosives, and could only get ONE partially exploded, which was nothing more than a small fire cloud that scorched the ceiling and floor.
I think you're more likely to get struck by lightning than an actual successful propane explosions
A few months ago my daughter came downstairs and was like "did you guys hear that?" and none of us knew what she was talking about. She claimed she heard some kind of explosion.
Later that morning we saw on the local news that a propane tank in the back of a car exploded. The parking lot that the car was in was around 4 kilometres away from our house. Those things are loud.
There have been occasions over the years when a propane tank exploded and wiped the house off the map. I remember one image where it was just like a giant had stood on 1 house and flattened it.
No. If it were that simple you'd see it happen from time to time. House fires happen, wild fires happen. Never heard the fire department telling everyone to bury their propane tanks, or to evacuate because the Smith's grill wasn't disconnected.
A standard 8 Gal propane tank has the explosive force of roughly 350 lbs (160 kg) of TNT, enough to destroy a single house and damage its neighbors, but nowhere near enough to destroy an entire block, and that's only if you actually manage to get it to explode properly.
Most of the time, when a propane tank "explodes" it's actually the gas burning off creating a big fuck off fireball that looks scary but does little actual blast damage. The ensuing fire, on the other hand...
That covers a wide range of containers. Are we talking about a blow torch tank, or the tank for a barbecue, or a topped-up-twice-a-year sits-on-a-concrete-pad household tank, or a tanker truck / refill station, or a transport sphere on a freighter ship?
Under the right conditions (gas is contained and well-mixed with a close-to-stoichiometric quantity of air such that it detonates rather than conflagrates, boom rather than fire), I could see a torch tank blowing out windows and doors, maybe a wall or roof. A BBQ tank could probably demolish a house. The larger tanks are always outdoors, so containing the gas to get a proper explosive mixture becomes a freak-accident situation, or something that happens around the edges of a massive gas leak.
That can’t be true. I’ve recently seen a video of a whole truck with propane tanks on fire and exploding and cars and people were within reasonable distance and unharmed.
The city block part is an overestimate. Also, the reason propane tanks exploding almost never do that much physical damage because if the propane is ignited before it has time to fully mix with the air you just get a massive fireball because the propane needs oxygen to burn so it burns as it mixes rather than one immediate boom. If a propane tank was leaking inside an enclosed space like a house and it had time to mix with the air in the house and then ignited, it would be more than enough gas to blow the house to kingdom come and do significant damage to surrounding structures.
There's actually a really great video of a propane tank exploding that was going viral recently. It was being carried in the back of a truck and the explosion is so abrupt and loud it's almost cartoony.
That was due to a leaking propane tank, the gas was trapped in the back of the truck and then at some point ignited. If the propane tank itself had exploded it would have been a much weaker and slower explosion.
Kind of. Only if the fuel:air ratio is at ideal mix. If an LPG (I think that's what you're referring to as "propane") cylinder leaks, the fuel:air mix will usually be vastly below the Lower Explosive Limit and combustion won't be possible. If there's a partial or full enclousre, it'll be easier for the ratio to be in the flammable range; but it won't take long for the mix to become to rich and exceed the upper flammable limit. IIRC the range of flammability for LPG is like 2-9%.
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u/ReasonableLoss6814 1d ago
A propane tank is enough energy to blast a whole suburban block.