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cr0y posted:I know we were talking about gas buildups in houses a while back, well this happened about 20 minutes from me. A friend of a family member lives about a dozen houses down and the blast took their shutters and screen door off. This is a pretty weird case, saw it on Reddit. Probably a gas explosion but…. The size was pretty unprecedented so, hard to say exactly what was going on in that house. And we may never know, everything was leveled to dust.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:16
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Inner Light posted:This is a pretty weird case, saw it on Reddit. Probably a gas explosion but…. The size was pretty unprecedented so, hard to say exactly what was going on in that house. And we may never know, everything was leveled to dust. From Reddit: quote:Confirmed 5 fatalities from friends that live nearby. They were replacing the hot water tank and I guess it was some sort of gas leak. The house was the oravitz residence, went to high school with the son and he was a really good dude. His dad was replacing the hot water tank and a neighbor came over to help him out and grabbed another neighbor to look at it who works in the gas industry. That neighbor brought his 11 year old son. The wife was upstairs when the house exploded and died. The guy who was replacing it is still alive and is in intensive care in the burn unit at mercy. If that's true you have to wonder how they didn't smell the gas. Or maybe they did and just assumed that because of the potency of mercaptan that it was a small amount and not pouring out of the pipe like it must have been.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:34
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I bought that combo CO/explosive gas detector. I am not sure why I never bothered to pick one up before but it's really a no brainer at $50. At least for the folks who died it was probably quick. Holy hell.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:38
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We had a house explosion in our city and this quote from the man that pulled the survivor out haunts me.quote:There was a fella standing in the middle of the house just screaming. I started talking to him and asked him if he was okay. He said he didn't know. I said, ‘Hang on, I'll get you out of here,’" Strain recalled. "I talked him down. I said, ‘Do you have any clothes?’ He said, ‘in the room.’ Well, you couldn’t tell where his room was. Part of it was in my yard. I found a piece of clothing to cover him up with, and we worked our way out of the house moving some debris along the way. Luckily no fatalities as the guys family had just left. Scary as hell. The house was old and a rental so I assume it had deferred maintenance that caught up with it in the worst way possible.
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Aug 14, 2023 18:46
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We just had a house in our town blow up from a gas leak a few weeks ago too, but luckily everyone inside survived with minor injuries. Including two dogs and a litter of puppies. I'm ordering one of those gas alarms for our utility room just for peace of mind. We've only got a water heater and furnace that are gas.
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Aug 14, 2023 19:06
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Inner Light posted:Probably a gas explosion but…. The size was pretty unprecedented No it isn't. That's pretty normal, especially in a home that has modern air sealing. Normally they also condemn the houses next to them by pushing them off their slab foundations several inches in addition to blowing out all the windows in several houses. +1PSI doesn't sound like a lot until you realize how many square inches are in a 2500 sqft home, remember there isn't just the floor it's pressing on. It's why you can't open a car door underwater despite only being a few inches submerged. Now, take that gas volume, it's a 50x50x8' volume of a mixture of gas, oxygen, and nitrogen. It's all at +1 psi because the house has great air sealing, and let's say we've reached equilibrium. Next your fridge, AC, or something, clicks on automatically and ignites it. That gas is all expanding and pressing outwards evenly against the structure of your home - glass windows, sheet rock, wood framing, roof, etc. Lots of nails and extremely strong fibrous wood, plus brittle glass. Google tells me Air expands: "1/483 parts for 1° Fahr" - I don't care if it's true. Let's say it spikes up 100F during the combustion phase of the methane. It's momentary - there isn't much fuel, but it's all on fire, and I don't know the exact math or science here but it doesn't really matter. It only has to overcome the strength of the chamber (house) for a fraction of a second. There's 4 walls in a house being pressed on in all directions by this expanding air, each wall is 50' long, 8' tall, 57,000 square inches, times 4, plus 2 walls (ceiling, floor) that are 50x50' so 360,000 sq inches. We will ignore that the slab foundation doesn't give a gently caress about your explosion, meaning more force goes the other 5 directions. +1 PSI * 360,000 = 360,000 lbs of force pressing "up" against the roof. That's fine, roof is cool with it. Now, the AC clicks on and you expand the volume of the air inside of a second as the combustion propagates... suddenly you're doubling? tripling? that pressure exerted. Eventually the windows blow out but that's not enough, and the nails start pulling clean out of things, the wood cracks, etc, as everything tries to reach equilibrium from the equilibrium - that's the explosion. This is why you don't gently caress with pressure vessels. It's why you can't open a door in a submarine if you lose pressure on the wrong (hull) side. It's why you can't open your car door in the water. It all adds up SO fast. H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 19:40 on Aug 14, 2023 |
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Aug 14, 2023 19:21
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SpartanIvy posted:If you have gas in your house you should do yourself a favor and install these near your gas appliances. Any suggested battery powered models? My utility closet doesn't have any outlets.
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Aug 14, 2023 19:39
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I could open a door underwater. easily
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Aug 14, 2023 19:45
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H110Hawk posted:No it isn't. That's pretty normal, especially in a home that has modern air sealing. Feeling better now about my ultra drafty house
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Aug 14, 2023 19:48
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SpartanIvy posted:If that's true you have to wonder how they didn't smell the gas. Or maybe they did and just assumed that because of the potency of mercaptan that it was a small amount and not pouring out of the pipe like it must have been. You go nose blind to it VERY quickly, and the smell saturates fast - you can't really tell concentration above smaller amounts. If you don't take constant action until you find and fix the source you will not smell it until you remove yourself to fresh air and reset. You can't just shrug and assume it was a fluke. Mind you my friends house always smelled like natural gas, but that was the leaky stove that had like 4 pilot lights in it. The source was near open flame so it could never get too bad. It had been that was for decades. Goons, man.
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Aug 14, 2023 19:48
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Wasn’t there a fraud case a couple years back, the couple emptied the house out of stuff then blew it up intentionally? Yup, here it is. https://www.indystar.com/story/news/2017/11/10/richmond-hill-explosion-7-keys-solving-case/846607001/
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Aug 14, 2023 20:25
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tomapot posted:Wasn’t there a fraud case a couple years back, the couple emptied the house out of stuff then blew it up intentionally? Ladies and gentlemen (and goons), I present Indiana.
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Aug 14, 2023 20:30
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As a fire investigator in LA Noire I know a thing or two about home explosions
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Aug 14, 2023 22:06
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Eason the Fifth posted:Feeling better now about my ultra drafty house Same, jfc. Maybe the little gaps in my lovely rear end windows are a blessing too
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Aug 14, 2023 22:40
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The most terrifying to me was a house in Colorado that filled with gas from an abandoned gas drilling well that wasn't capped off. The gas flowed through the soil into the basement and the home exploded. Natural gas is odorless, the stench is added in refining to make it safer.quote:FIRESTONE – A fatal house explosion was caused by odorless gas seeping from a cut-off underground pipeline into the house through French drains and a sump pit, Frederick-Firestone Fire Protection District chief Ted Poszywak said.
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Aug 14, 2023 22:43
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My friend lives in Arizona where apparently they have radon gas issues. Since she bought and moved into the house (~10 years ago) three of her cats have died of cancer her response is "yeah radon is detected in here, but it's really common for cats to die of cancer" oh ok
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Aug 14, 2023 23:28
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Radon exposure is like asbestos exposure: it takes decades to suffer any ill effects, and you might never experience any at all. Unless she's got world record high radon levels and those cats are also smoking two packs a day, it's likely something else.
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Aug 14, 2023 23:41
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Drafty house will only save you if the leak is well below the air changes per hour in your house. 
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Aug 14, 2023 23:43
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Hadlock posted:My friend lives in Arizona where apparently they have radon gas issues. Since she bought and moved into the house (~10 years ago) three of her cats have died of cancer her response is "yeah radon is detected in here, but it's really common for cats to die of cancer" oh ok Cats in the coal mine... If the radon level is so high that your friend is seeing 100% cat mortality in ~10 years, she probably isn't far behind. Or maybe she's had bad luck with cancer cats. Radon exposure is cheap and easy to measure, and The Internet says that mitigation isn't terribly expensive.
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Aug 14, 2023 23:44
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If cats are dying from exposure to radon your friend would already be dead. Radon doesn't kill you that fast and pets are likely to live their whole short lives without being impacted by it. With that said, get a radon detector and know what you're dealing with. I'm in an area known for not having radon issues but I also know that the rest of the population is loving stupid and would rather die than admit a mask can help against disease so I bought a radon monitor to verify that assumption. Luckily my radon levels are very low, but definitely not 0, and if I had a basement it would probably be a concern.
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Aug 14, 2023 23:56
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Yeah it's been a long time I recall it was somewhere in the squishy zone of "you should look into that more" and "it probably won't kill you" My thought was that the cats lay on the ground all day with their nose pretty much on the floor which is probably where the radon settles, and she is WFH and sits in a chair a good 3-5' off the ground. But that's all random conjecture I am not at all a radon expert at all except I bought a radiation detector for our last house since it had a basement and we have a toddler (we did not have detectable radon)
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Aug 15, 2023 00:12
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We finished our basement a few years ago and are starting to use it more ourselves, so I've just sent in my radon test kit and should have results this week. When we finished our basement, I asked our contractor about radon and he'd never heard of it.
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Aug 15, 2023 00:38
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As I understand it (which is, poorly), you either live in a radon area, or don't, and then if you do there's a sliding scale of how much radon is released and it can vary block to block in a neighborhood quite a bit. North Carolina had radon issues, but only in cities with granite outcrops, which was mostly up in the foothills of the appalachians. Orange and purple are less good to bad regions for radon  https://www.deq.nc.gov/energy-mineral-and-land-resources/geological-survey/geology-matters/radon-groundwater-nc-draft-map/download GIS for "<your state> radon map" yields pretty good results here is california, and then also zoomed in on south lake tahoe (which sits on a bunch of granite high up in the mountains)   
Hadlock fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 01:08
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When I moved into my house 6 years ago one of the first things I did was test for radon in the basement. It was pretty high, about double or triple the federal maximum. I mitigated it myself using pvc pipes and a radon fan off of Amazon. Took me two afternoons, the hardest part was mounting the PVC to the siding. It saved me about $2000 or so. Just need to drill holes in the slab, seal in PVC with urethane caulk, and run the exhaust above the roof line.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:13
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How many air changes an hour/day do you need to fix the radon problem in your basement, or how do you calculate that. Seems like maybe you'd run it on a timer, for an hour or two a day so you're not running it 24/7
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Aug 15, 2023 01:17
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Sorry for the Instagram link for the non instagrammers but someone's camera caught the explosion and just... Jesus Obviously trigger warning because it's a house loving exploding https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cv5BCrYohoW/?igshid=MmU2YjMzNjRlOQ==
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Aug 15, 2023 01:18
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Basically every house in my area of southeast PA has a radon mitigation system. It feels as common as having gutters.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:21
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Hadlock posted:As I understand it (which is, poorly), you either live in a radon area, or don't, and then if you do there's a sliding scale of how much radon is released and it can vary block to block in a neighborhood quite a bit. North Carolina had radon issues, but only in cities with granite outcrops, which was mostly up in the foothills of the appalachians. Orange and purple are less good to bad regions for radon Useful maps, thanks. I'm in the SF Bay Area which has enough yellow and orange on the map that 1) I'm glad I've done the test and 2) I'm still surprised my contractor had never heard of it.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:32
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People don't test for radon in California near as I can tell.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:36
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I think radon comes up depending on if you're in a hot spot or not. Radon wasn't something covered by my home inspection or any of the 700 pages of state required discolusures though, which, for california where every commercial building in the state has "prop 58 warning: this building may contain materials known to the state of california to cause cancer", is kind of suprising Neat interactive map, city of SF is surprisingly not included. Any time there's stuff, like surface liquefaction risk, SF seems to be conveniently excluded https://maps.conservation.ca.gov/cgs/radon/ 
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Aug 15, 2023 01:42
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Hadlock posted:How many air changes an hour/day do you need to fix the radon problem in your basement, or how do you calculate that. Seems like maybe you'd run it on a timer, for an hour or two a day so you're not running it 24/7 Radon mitigation systems pull air from under your slab or foundation, so that the radon never enters your building envelope at all. They run at a low but constant pressure, 24/7.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:45
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Hadlock posted:I think radon comes up depending on if you're in a hot spot or not. Whew, had me worried glancing at the map. We're green! Looked up my sister in law and it's not covered by the map so it must be fine. Also who knew Encino/Calabasas was red.
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Aug 15, 2023 01:53
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Hey I know you all were on top of it. But if someone gives outright dangerous advice like "burn your poison ivy" again, in addition to reporting it please pm me and/or pmchem so we can edit the post ASAP! We get an email with the pm, and will almost always see that faster than checking reports. Right Arm, that wasn't funny, people do follow advice that is given here. That could cause a life threatening allergic reaction. Baddog fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Aug 15, 2023 |
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Aug 15, 2023 03:59
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Bad advice is often the ONLY advice followed here. Goons in wells and all that.
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Aug 15, 2023 04:03
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Underside of my stairs insulated for no reason 
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Aug 15, 2023 05:13
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What goons went in what wells?
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Aug 15, 2023 05:24
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cr0y posted:What goons went in what wells? Well I just burned a poo poo load of three leafed vines, for one.
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Aug 15, 2023 05:51
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You shouldn't burn poison ivy when you're inexperienced, if you're curious about it buy some poison ivy gummies instead
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Aug 15, 2023 06:04
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cr0y posted:What goons went in what wells? I'm so happy someone else asked because my curiosity is peaked.
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Aug 15, 2023 07:09
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cr0y posted:What goons went in what wells? https://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=2573
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Aug 15, 2023 14:04
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