The most tragically stupid one I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve heard of quite a few, was a crew of oil field workers, dealing with a bunch of water in a pipe that had frozen.
What I find so tragic is how there were many full grown adults who were present when it happened, and how no one called out for the stupidity to stop just baffles me.
So here’s what happened…..
A crew of guys, probably 12-20 guys, we’re trying to pump water under high pressure into a well, the process is called fracturing, or Frac-ing, you may have heard of it. The pumps are massive, usually a v12 or v16 diesel mounted on a semi trailer. Water comes into the pump through a 4 inch low pressure hose, and leaves the pump through thick “iron” pipes, these have a bore of about 3.5 inches and the steel is about an inch and an inch and a half thick. These are designed to withstand 10,000 to 15,000 psi generally.
Frac-ing in winter time always is a challenge.
Well, these guys were not having a good day, and they froze up a length of iron solid with ice. The iron is usually in 4 foot to 8 foot long sections.
So they pulled the iced up length of iron from the rest of the stuff, set it up where they could work on it better, and proceeded to heat it with a propane weed burner to melt the ice. By now you can probably guess where this is going. The guy who was standing in front of the open end of the pipe died instantly when a 4 inch round chunk of ice blew a hole clean threw his chest.
How no one involved saw the danger there, still just boggles my mind.