LPG Tanker Explosion: Routine Delivery to BLEVE!

Ajouté : 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]A routine fuel delivery, a safety violation, and then a fireball that blew out windows in residential buildings a block away.

[00:00:08]This is what a BLEVE actually looks like in real life.

[00:00:11]This is Stashed. I'm Pat, mechanical engineer and firefighter.

[00:00:16]On May 16th, 2026, in Pyatigorsk, Russia, was I close? What appears to be a LPG tanker was in the middle of a routine delivery. It was pumping the liquefied petroleum gas from the truck into the station's underground storage tanks.

[00:00:30]At some point during that transfer, something went very wrong.

[00:00:35]The local media states it was a violation of some type of safety regulation. I'm sure there's something lost in translation there, but it could have been a leak at a connection point, a grounding failure, improper procedure.

[00:00:46]We don't know exactly the cause yet, but again, something went wrong and there was some big fire. But this wasn't just fire. This appears to be a true BLEVE, boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion.

[00:00:59]Here's what that looks like. Once that fire started at the tanker, the heat begins working on the vessel itself. The LPG is stored as a liquid. It's going to be right around, I don't know, 100 to 150 PSI, but it really depends on the ambient temperature outside, at least before the fire, because that ambient temperature, it plays a big role in the pressure that's actually inside that vessel. And the vessel itself should be rated right around 300 PSI, but I'll come back to that. As the fire starts to heat up that vessel, the liquid inside, it starts to boil. Boiling LPG, it produces gas, just like boiling water, steam. Those gases, they have nowhere to go. It builds pressure inside the tank.

[00:01:38]At the same time, that fire's also weakening the steel shell from the outside. You've got increasing pressure on the inside and a weakening vessel on the outside. That's a really bad combination.

[00:01:56]My goal for 2026 is 100,000 subscribers, but let's get it to 75,000 first. Now remember, the vessel is rated for around 300 PSI. As the temperature inside increases, you can quickly climb well above 500 PSI. At that point, it's basic physics. Now the pressure relief valves on that vessel did appear to be working.

[00:02:16]You can see them venting.

[00:02:22]But there's a limit to what they can do.

[00:02:24]When the heat inside exceeds what the relief valve can handle, pressure keeps climbing. When the shell gets weak enough, it fails catastrophically.

[00:02:36]Now this does appear to be a full-size LPG transport trailer, not a small delivery truck. We're talking somewhere in the range of 8,000 to 10,000 gallons of capacity. But during that failure, there's a significant expansion rate.

[00:02:49]One gallon of liquid LPG flashes to roughly 270 gallons of vapor almost instantaneously.

[00:02:56]The tank was actively unloading when the fire started, so we don't know how much product was actually left inside that vessel, but even if it was half empty, you're looking at potentially over a million gallons of vapor released in a fraction of a second. That's a BLEVE.

[00:03:10]Unfortunately, six people were injured, one seriously. The blast wave damaged nearby shops, a transformer substation, a gas line, and it blew out windows in 17 different apartments in neighboring residential buildings. The director of the gas station network actually has already been detained and is being processed because there's a criminal case pending. Now in this case, it doesn't appear that firefighters were on scene when this thing let loose. But if they were, cooling the tank it's your best option. That's assuming it was actually LPG. Get water on that vessel continuously to absorb heat, slow the weakening and buy time. It's not guaranteed, but it is the right move and it can work. Compressed natural gas on the other hand, CNG, is a completely different animal. You're dealing with gas that's already stored at extremely high pressure. There's no liquid phase to absorb the heat in the same way. The tactics around CNG, it requires extreme caution and a lot of distance. Either way, anytime you have a compressed gas, it's a pretty scary situation. You make that a compressed flammable gas, it's a completely different animal. There's a significant amount of energy released if there's a failure, and when things go wrong, it goes wrong fast. The investigation is ongoing, but the lessons here, it's not complicated. When you're unloading a tanker, there's well-established safety protocols for a reason. When those protocols get skipped or the equipment isn't up to standard, you don't get a second chance to fix it.