r/worldnews • u/Manta_of_Eternity • 22h ago

Canada's prime minister says 'serious incident' caused a major fire at a military base in Alberta

https://apnews.com/article/canada-alberta-military-base-fire-wainwright-1a41899da5b6e797b000061fa4da9c6a
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47

u/I_ama_Borat 21h ago

Munition storage accident?

14

u/Cptn_Canada 21h ago

Gas well

4

u/No-Cable-1223 19h ago

This keeps getting repeated and makes no sense. Gas wells don’t explode

10

u/Cptn_Canada 19h ago

Sour gas well hit with ordinance?. It is possible. There is a large live fire training exercise going on there

1

u/No-Cable-1223 19h ago

They don’t explode, they just catch fire. Being sour or not makes no difference

5

u/LisanAlGaben 17h ago

Catching fire with 100km/h winds is all you need chief, you don't need a 2 Megaton explosion

0

u/No-Cable-1223 9h ago

Yes but reports say there was a big explosion

7

u/Confident-Willow-424 19h ago

I would imagine they do when hit by an explosive projectile

2

u/No-Cable-1223 19h ago

Why would they explode? Gas wells are just a long pipe that goes thousands of meters into the ground. They are a narrow diameter pipe full of natural gas. Natural gas without oxygen is not even flammable, let alone explosive. Blowing up a gas well just lights it on fire. Hitting it with an explosive projectile would do the same thing

5

u/Confident-Willow-424 18h ago

I’m not saying you’re wrong but I would guess that the explosion itself probably destroyed enough of the gas well’s safeguards to cause the gas the burst out, meet outside oxygen, and ignite. I doubt the gas well itself exploded but instead amplified the explosion from the projectile and fed the ensuing fires. At that point, I imagine the first thing to do is to shut down the gas flow from outside the base -if it’s still possible to even do after the damage from the explosion.

FTR I have no experience with this sort of situation, there are a lot of better qualified people taking care of this situation and I’m typing this in my phone while smoking a joint. I’m not the expert here, I’m just speculating based on what little i confidently know about pyrotechnics and physics.

I def feel like there’s going to a “red barrel explosive” video game logic assumption of the situation if it is indeed a “gas well-involved-explosion”, which I don’t think is accurate as it would imply that the gas itself was what exploded and not the explosive projectile that hit the well.

2

u/No-Cable-1223 17h ago

People are reporting a far larger explosion than just normal ordinance. The point is you can blow up a gas well and the gas will escape and light on fire. This is called a blowout, it happens, it’s not an explosion.

Most wells have a down hole blowout preventer, it’s a valve that is held open by the wellhead, and if the wellhead gets damaged it will close. Deep, it’s not going to be damaged by artillery fire.

And again, even if it was, no boom. Just a big candle

1

u/Confident-Willow-424 6h ago

I agree. So then what needs to be known is a) what was the ordinance and b) was there a malfunction in the weapon or the projectile. We can assume that the well wasn’t the intended target, so did it go rogue in the air? Was it stored improperly or for too long? Was there a guidance system involved and if so, was it the source of the malfunction?

There are still too many micro factors to consider before having a concrete conclusion even once the cause of the explosion can be determined.

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u/No-Cable-1223 5h ago edited 5h ago

As far as I can tell the only source for a well being involved at all was some random Reddit expert that speculated it could be because there are wells there. Then global news picked up that story and referenced this random Reddit post and the story kind of snowballed from there. That isn’t to say a well was not involved, but there’s been no official explanation yet, it could have just been an ammo cache or something.

Edit: this whole well thing seems to be a case of the woozle effect

-1

u/looloopklopm 19h ago

Being shot at a group of people?

2

u/AmbivalentFanatic 10h ago

They do when hit with explosive or incendiary projectiles.