The Braamfontein Explosion

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26 thoughts on “The Braamfontein Explosion”

  4. Simon's closing words remarking that people of every race died in the mines and construction of Johannesburg is completely accurate. It's one of a tiny handful of places on the planet where a city was built on the slave-like working conditions of nearly every race on the planet. If we set aside the working conditions for a moment and look at what people have managed to build, it's quite impressive. But let's never forget that the people who built these amazing structures and cities were forced to under horrific conditions with little or no pay.

    Being fairly familiar with explosives I do know what kind of stupidity you can get away with when using Hydrogel/Blasting Gel. It is by a long way one of the safest explosives to handle, even throwing boxes of it around, while not recommended for hopefully obvious reasons, is actually fairly safe. However; at the start of the episode we were told that the explosives were "prepared" at a factory and then shipped to the mine. And we know that the detonators were in a car with the explosives. I'm wondering if by "prepared" they meant that they had inserted the detonators at the factory. Today, and possibly then, that is a completely unacceptable practice and in my view is equivalent to shipping a bomb with a lit fuse. If it were the case that the detonators were inserted into the gel, a shunt could set off a detonator that's been cooking in the south African sun for 3 days.

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  6. When tnt sweats the nitro glycerin sweats out of the casing and when hot becomes extremely sensitive and can be set off by a shock such as a crate falling and hitting a hard surface as an expert in this field that is most likely what happened nitro glycerin is always shock sensitive but more so when hot

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  19. The accident has two parts. The train and the dynamite.

    The train was on the wrong track due to the negligence of the head shunter and the engineer. If the train had come to a full stop – or even slowed and prepared to stop, at the switches, the position could have been verified and the train not entered the wrong siding.

    The explosives should have been relatively stable in the heat. The problem is the blasting caps needed to blow the explosives. They are less stable and, depending on whether it used a fuse or an electric detonator, more or less easier to set off.

    In theory, the shuntter hits the dynamite freight cars. With gel and caps improperly loaded, the impact breaks some of the gel's containers, spilling it, and breaks open some boxes of caps, dumping them in or near the spilled gel. If they are using fuses, you just need a spark to light one off and ….. BOOOM!!!!!!

    Therefore, my conclusion is that the explosion is the fault of the train crew, with negligence on the parts of all those responsible for the explosives still being there in the first place. Had the cars been loaded properly, as they left the plant, there might not have been an accidental detonation, regardless of whether they were baking in the sun for a day or a month.

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  20. Dynamite comes with a shelf life as the binder (originally diatomaceous earth) breaks down due to the NG eventually leaching out. While TNT is significantly safer including the binders used, gelatin still has a expiration date and stored in high heat (>100F) would break down significantly faster, especially if it was humid.

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  23. big brain; click delete instead of edit.
    long story short: blasting gelatine is very flammable and can sustain combustion without oxygen, modern inert binder plastic explosives (c4, semtex etc.) aren't supposed to be ignitable by flame at all. nitroglycerine mixtures were considered/used (not sure) as rocket propellant and NG or EGDN (again, not sure if the latter is actually used commercially)/nitrocellulose colloid, although in a vastly different ratio to blasting gel, is pretty much double base smokeless powder. handling blasting gel, or anything containing shorter chained nitrated polyols for that matter, with your bare hands also gives you a fucking nasty headache.

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