Maritime Security: LPG Threat

Tom Clancy in his novel "Debt of Honor" has described how a Japanese pilot deliberately crashes a jet into the Capitol building in devastating terror attack. The novel had been published seven years prior 9/11. Below is an excerpt from Frederick Forsyth's novel "The Afghan". Is this another gloomy prediction that may come true?

'Liquid natural gas, known as LNG, is hard to ignite,' Seymour countered. 'It is stored at minus two hundred and fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit in special double-hulled vessels. Even if you took one over, the stuff would have to leak into the atmosphere for hours before it became combustible. But according to the eggheads there is one that frightens the hell out of them. LPG. Liquid Petroleum Gas.

'It is so awful that a quite small tanker, if torched within ten minutes of catastrophic rupture, would unleash the power of thirty Hiroshima bombs. It would be the biggest non-nuclear explosion on this planet.'

'In layman's language, what have you come here to say, Sam?'
...
Thirty times the Hiroshima bomb. How on earth can a small tanker be worse than the entire Manhattan project?'

'With an atomic bomb, Steve, the damage comes in four waves. The flash is so searingly bright it can cauterize the cornea of a watcher unless he has black lens shields. Then comes the heat, so bad it causes everything in its path to selfincinerate. The shock wave knocks down buildings miles away and the gamma-ray radiation is long term, causing carcinoma and malformations. With the LPG explosion forget three - this explosion is all heat.

'But it is a heat so fierce that it will cause steel to run like honey and concrete to crumble to dust. You've heard of the fuel-air bomb? It is so powerful it makes napalm seem mild, yet they both have the same source: petroleum.

'LPG is heavier than air. In transportation it is not, like LNG, at an amazingly low temperature; it is under pressure. Hence the double-hulled skins of LPG tankers. When ruptured the LPG will gush out, quite invisible, and mix with the air. It is heavier than air so it will swirl around the place it came from, forming one enormous fuel-air bomb. Ignite that, and the entire cargo will explode in flame, terrible flame, rising quickly to five thousand degrees Centigrade. Then it will start to roll.

'Now it creates its own wind. It will roll outwards from the source, a roaring tide of flame, consuming everything in its path until it has consumed itself. Then it gutters like a fading candle and dies.'

'How far will the fireball roll?'

'Well, according to my new-found boffin friends a small tanker of, say, eight thousand tonnes, fully vented and ignited, would consume everything and extinguish all human life within a five-kilometre radius.

'One last thing, I said it creates its own wind. It sucks in the air from periphery to centre, to feed itself, so even humans in a protective shell five clicks away from the epicentre will die of asphyxia.'

Steve Hill had a mental image of a city clustered round its harbour and port after such a horror exploded within it. Not even the outer suburbs would survive.

Maritime Security Markets and Technology

Maritime Security: LPG Threat

Maritime Security
Markets and Technology