On May 4, 1988, the PEPCON plant experienced three major and several smaller explosions that caused over $70 million in property damage and caused two deaths. The PEPCON plant produced Ammonium Perchlorate (AP), a major ingredient for rocket fuel. The PEPCON plant and the nearby Kidd Marshmallow plant were totally destroyed by the detonations. The initiating event for the explosions was a fire that originated in the Batch Dryer Building and spread to adjacent storage. Several factors combined to cause the AP in the major storage fields to detonate, the most important being lack of adequate separation between storage units. Welding and flame cutting procedure with poor fire watch protocol was the prime candidate for fire ignition. There were no automatic fire suppression systems at the plant. Buildings including the Batch Dryer Building were made of combustible building material (fiberglass). There was poor housekeeping and no control of AP dust generation. AP was stored in combustible polyethylene drums, aluminum tote bins, 30-gallon steel storage drums and fiber reinforced tote bags. There were high-density storage practices. In addition, a contributing factor to the rapid fire-spread was that the wind that day was blowing directly from the batch dryer building to the storage areas. This paper claims that if codes, standards, and well-known hazard identification safety techniques were implemented at PEPCON, then the disaster would have been averted. A limited scope probabilistic risk assessment was conducted to establish the effectiveness of various preventive and mitigative features that could have been deployed to avert the disaster. The major hazard at the PEPCON site was fire and explosion involving the processing, production and storage of AP, which was then and is currently stored as a class 4 oxidizer.

An explosion at the PEPCON ammonium-perchlorate plant on May 4, 1988, in Henderson, Nevada, broke more than 10,000 windows and caused over $70 million damages to the Henderson-Las Vegas communities. A lawsuit by a conglomerate of insurors led to "discovery" of 77 claims for various injuries. Most of the 306 people treated at hospitals did not participate in this suit; their injury costs were apparently paid by medical insurance and not incorporated into the combined damage claim. Their records could not be obtained for analysis because of patient privacy considerations. Nevertheless, their number from the newspapers could be compared to window damage claims to show roughly one laceration victim per 100 broken window panes. Damage analyses led to a determination that the equivalent TNT yield of the largest and most damaging explosion was about 250 tons, surface burst. Weather conditions and glass damage claims were combined to provide a plan map of overpressure isobars for comparison with injury claims from the lawsuit. A number of examples are compared to results from other incidents.

Analysis of the 1988 Pepcon explosion; includes interviews and excerpts from journals of various residents in the community.

On July 25, 2000, a small piece of debris on the runway at a Paris airport caused a tire to blow out on an Air France Concorde during its take off. A heavy slab of rubber that spun off from a tire created a shock wave in a wing tank, which burst open and sent fuel streaming into an engine intake. As flames trailed two hundred feet behind, the aircraft rolled out of control. The crash killed all 109 people on board and 4 more on the ground. The tragedy of that departing Concorde is just one of many such chain-reaction catastrophes that have occurred as the world has grown more technologically complex and as our machines have become more difficult to control -- and more deadly. Now, in a riveting investigation into the causes and often brutal consequences of technological breakdowns, James R. Chiles offers stunning new insights into the increasingly frequent machine disasters that haunt our lives. The shocking breakup of the Challenger; the dark February morning when the Atlantic swallowed the giant drilling rig Ocean Ranger; the fiery PEPCON factory explosion in Nevada; a deadly runaway police van in Minnesota: Chiles tracks the causes and consequences of these system breakdowns and others, vividly demonstrating why the battle between man and machine may be escalating beyond manageable limits -- and why we all have a stake in its outcome. Chiles reconstructs moments of confusion and then terror as systems collapse, operators make fateful, sometimes incorrect choices, and disaster follows. He uncovers surprising links between past and present tragedies, such as the connections between nineteenth-century steamboat explosions and twentieth-century nuclear power plant failures. And he analyzes the numerous near misses that don't always make the evening news -- times when the quick thinking, heroic gestures, and expert actions of a few individuals have saved the lives of many, often just in time. Combining riveting storytelling with eye-opening findings, Inviting Disaster shows what happens when our reach for new technology exceeds our grasp, and explains what we need to know to survive on the machine frontier.