So it's 3:45 in the morning. And all the sudden the house shook briefly and there's this blisteringly loud sound. A few moments after the silence and I could hear sirens and alarms sounding all over town. Later, I find out that said explosion was heard all the way to a town almost twenty minutes away.

It was my job. I work at a chemical plant. And the DSN plant went up. I wouldn't find out until closer to 7:00. By the time I got to work, there were cops, first aid, and news reporters there. There was no power restored until 11:30. And I had a lot of work on my hands. Getting the servers up and hoping nothing was lost in the explosion or subsequent power outage. Luckily everything came back. The Exchange server had one of it's power supplies go out, and a few computer monitors and power supplies didn't make it through the blast. I've just now got everything back up that can be brought back up. A good chunk of our network and hardware went up with it. But for the areas of the plant that weren't affected to badly, things seem to be coming along as best as I could have hoped for.

Here are some shots taken around the plant. This is no where near ground zero, but I plan to get some pictures of that up soon. I'm not the one taking these pictures, so as more come out, I'll post them.


This is what most the non-cemented buildings look like:


And this was taken from another plant on the other side of the property:


And this is what it looks like inside the actual buildings (not a storage facility or plant):

Jeez, man. What the f*ck happened?

Either way, I'm glad you're okay. There wasn't anyone in the plat that early in the morning, was there?

Holy crap. Seconding Ixz's thought, thank goodness you were't in there! That looks scary as heck, man. I also hope everyone who may have been there when it happened pull out okay from that.

I've looked around the web, and all the news articles say that no injuries were caused by this.

Now, here's the next question. Do you still have a job?

Thank goodness for that.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/ ... 0720120515

Doesn't sound too hot, but hopefully this gets resolved so you get the moola Lantis.D: Though, if you're handling that many servers and whatnot, I imagine you'd be super important to getting the systems back online.

Hoping the best for you.

I don't know about that link. Everything other than the DNS was running wide open today. That's a lot of activity for something that's supposedly been "shut down for an indefinite period." Just sayin'

And yeah, I've been very busy. I don't think I'll be losing my job any time soon. And yeah, no one was hurt during the explosion. It was at four in the morning. The only people there were the control room guys. And they're all fine.

Anyways, I've got some new pictures to post tomorrow. I'll also try to get a video of the engineering building some time.

Wow. O.O

Glad to know nobody got hurt. I can imagine the scare the control room guys got. I mean, if towns 20 mins away felt it.. wow

Well, US News media. I didn't click the Fox News link at least. Glad everything is better than they're making it out.

Here are some new pictures. These show better how powerful the explosion actually was.

This is the top and bottom floor of a control room about 250 yards away from the blast:


This is an I-beam that was thrown about 500 yards from the DSN. It used to be straight... and not ripped in half at the end:


This fence was at the edge of the property, pieces barreled through it and off towards the woods:


This rut was probably a good 600 to 700 yards away from the blast. Whatever it was, it dug a hole longer than the car in the picture. It's about two feet deep, and whatever it was, it skipped across the ground from there and landed into a lake not far from here. You can KIND OF see some of the lake at the top of the picture:


And here is where it all happened. This first picture is part of the DSN. There isn't a lot left. In the second picture, you can see what actually blew up (or what is left of it). What really gets me is you don't even see the foundation on the ground. It looks like there was just nothing ever there to begin with (assuming all the debris on the ground was moved).


Going to try and see if I can get into the engineering building today. If I can I'll get some video of what it did to the inside of it.

Also, the plant manager emailed us today assuring us that this plant isn't shutting down and that we have a great future to look forward to, just a bit of work to get there.

Those are some scary images, man. It's a miracle that everyone was okay.

Wow. So, do they know what caused it?

Were you guys secretly housing a meth lab?

I need to see some before-the-explosion shots for comparison.

I looked around the pictures and couldn't find any real good pictures to compare. Most of all the pictures are of close up parts that make up the plant as a whole. I'll keep looking though. If I run across one, I'll post it.

But for now, I was able to get into the engineering building and get some footage of what the explosion did inside. This was about 200 yards from the plant that blew up.

This video is private.

Change it to "unlisted" if you don't want your subscribers seeing it.

Fixed. Sorry about that.

Freaky stuff. Was anybody in that building at the time?

Luckily no. The only people on the plant at the time were control room operators. And none of them were hurt. That engineering building was completely empty.

How close was the control room to ground zero? And did they have any warning that this was going to happen? I've read a few articles that said this was caused by an exploding transformer, so that wouldn't have been something they could've predicted.