Formosa Water Park explosion (2015)

So far one fatality, and hundreds injured at a water park in Bali, near Danshui.

Being a little old, and a country gent, I had to look up ‘color party’.

They were making clouds out of flour. Apparantly city slickers around the world have been doing this a lot recently.

Pretty dumb if you ask me. Now they know the explosive power of flour.

Condolences to the victims. How could no-one have seen this coming?

Otherwise known as a fuel-air bomb.

Complete lack of safety awareness. Tragic.

A year before my studies, I worked in a silo at a harbor unloading ships filled with flour.
During the six month working there, we had tree smaller dust explosions.
One time, a silly guy was welding at the bottom iron part of the 60 meter silo tower, while the other silly guy in the control center started to load flour or moving flour to or from that silo.
Of course, that guy flew of the ladder. Luckily the explosion wasn’t as big as it possibly could have been.
On time, someone was welding at the enclosed conveyor belt. An hour later that belt was back in service.
I was just about to walk past it when it blew up.

Under the right conditions, dust explosions can take out whole neighborhoods.

It’s the same reason why large quantities of coffee creamer, if sprayed into the air, can explode if ignited. It’s why silos can explode.

The live news feed looks like a warzone, but some of the video coming out of the moment it happened now looks like hell itself.

Here’s a live feed:

This is the scene of hell on earth uploaded to youtube:

Unreal.

90 hospitalized, 19 of whom are in the ICU.

More video of when the explosion occured:

dailymail.co.uk/news/article … 5609150001

I’m in Europe right now and it’s news on all the TV channels here.

If anybody wants to meet the guy responsible, I bet he’ll be at the airport today.

I’m posting this in the “Taiwan Politics” section mainly because I know this is going to turn into a political circus.

Some of you may not yet be aware of the disaster last night at the Formosa Water Park near Tamsui. It wasn’t reported in today’s Taipei Times, though perhaps it will be later today (I’m posting this at 8 AM).

Story in the Chinese media here:
chinatimes.com/newspapers/20 … 364-260102

Here’s something in English from the foreign press:
nydailynews.com/news/world/c … -1.2273478

No doubt there will be saturation coverage in the media, so no need for me to go into the details.

Anyway, it’s all a horrible tragedy, and I’m very sympathetic to the victims. But my main reason for posting is the political angle. Since it happened in Xintaibei, I’m predicting calls for Eric Chu to take responsibility and resign. There seems to be an unofficial rule in Taiwanese politics: “Let no human tragedy go unexploited.”

Perhaps an underling who had nothing to do with the tragedy whatsoever will have to fall on his sword. The people who actually did cause the disaster will barely get a footnote in the press.

It was painful enough watching the video of all those innocent people being caught in the fire - it will be even more painful watching video of grandstanding politicians foaming at the mouth over the next month or two.

Over 400 injured…

There’s another thread on this in the Open Forum.

It was a full front-page story in this morning’s Lian He Bao.

Last year or the year before that Kaoxiong prohibited a ‘color-run’ … same principle. It’s flour, mixed with food colors the organizers said, why waste food to throw into the air and inhale small particles of flour into your lungs while running … hey it’s colorfull-funny. It’s being done all over the world now. Now there is a precedent set to not allow them, the ‘color-runs’

BTW, dust explosions happen more than you think, that’s why at loading or unloading, trucks and silos need to be earth connected to prevent sparks from static electricity.


here’s a report 2 years ago warning that this type of event is an accident waiting to happen.

My Chinese sucks but I got the point that something is fishy at “feichang high”. The stupid stuff people do…

Thanks for letting me know about the thread in the Open Forum. I didn’t see that.

The story is also front-page news is the Liberty Times, which is the Taipei Times Chinese-language paper, so I’m a little surprised that the TT doesn’t have the story. I guess their deadlines are much earlier in the day.

Taipei Times only updates with new stories once a day, at midnight.

The Yesterday Times is usually a day behind because they have to go through the processes of translating into English, editing, and then taking care of page layout. It’s understandable for print, but they should really work on live updates for the website like Focus Taiwan, Taiwan News, and even China Post do.