Talk:Texas City Refinery (BP)
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I recommend the following improvements to this article:
1) Is there a source to confirm that a carburetor was the source of the explosion? I doubt that a truck on site at the refinery used a carburetor. Perhaps fuel injector is more appropriate, but "fuel system" would be preferred if the actual source is unknown.
2) The comparison to Chernobyl seems superfluous and illegitimate. It is not explained, nor was any evidence found in the US Chemical Safety Board's animation. I will be removing this.
3) Language explaining the actual ignition at the truck seems contrived. I'm not the one to do it, but let's clean it up with more technical phrasing.
4) Incorporation of the following article into the accident description:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070320/ap_on_bi_ge/bp_plant_explosion
All in all, this seems to be a description of the explosion more than the refinery. Perhaps the explosion section should be moved to it's own article.
--67.176.29.1 22:05, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
- Comment: On item (1) above, perhaps it would be better to change "carburetor" to "intake". The History Channel's Engineering Disasters piece on the explosion stated it was a diesel truck. This seems consistent with the report that the engine was heard to rev when the vapors reached the intake, which is a likely occurence in a diesel engine when flamable vapors or liquids are introduced into the intake. This is much less likely to occur on a gasoline engine (implied by the carburetor mentioned in the current version of the article), where continued combustion at higher RPM's would have required greater airflow from opening the throttle to maintain a combustible air/fuel ratio. Diesel engines, on the otherhand, do not have actual throttle valves. The engine speed is controlled by varying the amount of fuel either injected into the cylinder or atomized into the intake air before the intake valve(s). The intake is free to take in air (or in this case, flammable vapors) unrestricted. From this distinction between how diesel and gasoline engines operate, my opinion is that "carburetor" should probably be struck from the article and replaced with "air intake". Ryanniemi (talk) 01:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
