Quote:Huge Shipment of Explosive Chemicals Disappears In Mojave Desert, Investigation Underway (May 19, 2023)

30 tons of ammonium nitrate was reported missing from a train car after it stopped in the Mojave Desert.

California officials are investigating the disappearance of 30 tons (61,000 pounds) of ammonium nitrate from a railcar crossing the Midwest. Ammonium nitrate, which is used as fertilizer, can also be used to create explosives and was a key component in the homemade bomb used in the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The chemical was shipped by train from Cheyenne, Wyoming last month but when it arrived in the Mojave Desert two weeks later, its holding car was empty and the nitrate was gone. Dyno Nobel, the company responsible for shipping the ammonium nitrate is a leader in commercial explosives and filed a report with the federal National Response Center (NRC) on May 10 and an investigation is currently underway.

The Federal Railroad Administration, the California Public Utilities Commission, Union Pacific, and Dyno Nobel are looking into the disappearance, and the railcar is being transported back to Wyoming to undergo a thorough inspection.

It is unclear how or when the chemical disappeared during transit, but Dyno Nobel told KQED News, “The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit.”

Given that the chemical can be used to make highly explosive bombs, the loss of such an enormous amount of explosive material is highly concerning, and Stan Blake, a former Wyoming lawmaker and retired train conductor told Cowboy State Daily News it wouldn’t have been difficult to drain the train car of the material. Blake told the outlet that each car has two or three sections with a gate at the bottom, and said, “You can use up a big bar and open that gate and it’ll pour out.”

Dyno Nobel did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment but said in a statement to Cowboy State Daily News that the railcar had made multiple stops on its journey and that there is a team working to investigate how the supposed leak occurred. “We take this matter seriously and will work to understand how it happened and how it can be prevented from occurring again,” the spokesperson said.

A Union Pacific spokesperson told Cowboy State Daily News that the loss of the ammonium nitrate is not something to be overly concerned about. “Assuming the loss occurred during transport, the release of the fertilizer to the ground beneath railroad tracks should pose no risk to public health or the environment.”

David King, a Campbell County emergency management coordinator, told the outlet that it isn’t likely the chemical was stolen and said he doesn’t believe it was gathered to be used to create illegal explosives. “If I was going to make an IED [improvised explosive device], ammonia nitrate wouldn’t be my choice of explosive,” he told the outlet, adding, “It’s not a ‘set your hair on fire’ situation.”

Quote:OF UKRAINIAN (AND URANIUM?) EXPLOSIONS, AND MISSING EXPLOSIVES IN ...

Regular leaders here probably all saw that explosion of the munitions storage dump in the western Ukraine last week, and the firey roiling mushroom clouds that accompanied them. There has been the usual chatter on the internet and various sites that the explosions may have been of a storage facility where some of the munitions were depleted uranium, and that hence, the explosions may have been "nuclear" in some form or fashion. I have to be honest: I have seen two starkly different recordings of the same explosions, and to my eyes, they show two very different events. In the version that most people have seen, the explosions occur in a massive fireball, and very tellingly, as the fireball rises to form a mushroom cloud, there is continued fire and burning of material in the cloud, a typical signature of a nuclear detonation. Continued combustion in the cloud as it rises is a typical signature of a nuclear explosion, and the burn continues until the material is burned out. The other video - much rarer -  shows the initial explosion, but little to no burn immediately thereafter in the mushroom cloud. We were then treated to a variety of experts on various YouTube channels talking about the question that the depleted uranium allegedly in storage at the facility had some sort of burn, and we were assured by these experts that there was no such possibility.

I'm not so sure. Under normal conditions of use, the kinetic impact of a depleted uranium round is so fast and therefore energetic, that the uranium literally burns inside the target, killing the people within.  After all, the mechanism of the Little Boy uranium bomb was precisely a 5" naval rifle - a cannon once again - that fired a projectile of uranium-235 into a target, which itself consisting of more uranium-235. It was the sheer speed and kinetic energy of the impact that initiated the reaction. So for those who know their ordnance, a depleted uranium round is like a hollow charge HEAT round, on steroids. Think of your standard HEAT round as the old actor Wally Cox, and a depleted uranium round as Arnold Schwarzenneggar, and you get the idea. Why depleted uranium? because it is an extremely dense material in its metallic form(much more so than gold or lead) an therefore much heavier per unit of volume than gold or lead. As for a burn under explosive conditions, it is to be remembered that smashing two bits of highly enriched uranium-235 together in one's hands can literally cause a kind of sub-critical nuclear "fizzle", and indeed, such an incident actually happened by accident during the wartime American Manhattan Project. So I am not entirely convinced by the experts on YouTube calmly assuring us that we are not watching any sort of nuclear combustion in the vast majority of the videos of the incident. Indeed, perhaps a fuel air explosive would have enough brisance to create the kinetic conditions for rounds of depleted uranium to respond with a burn.

But my chief explosive concern here today is this story shared by E.G. and many other regular readers out there, about 30 tons of ammonia nitrate that appears to have gone missing from a freight train on its way from Wyoming to Looneyfornia:

30-Ton Shipment Of Explosive Chemical Disappears Between California And Wyoming

Now this story just has "TROUBLE" written all over it, and if you're like me - and you probably are otherwise you probably wouldn't be reading this website - you're going to find the "narrative" here a bit disturbing:

Quote:A 30-ton shipment of ammonium nitrate, a chemical used as both fertilizer and as a component in explosives, has gone missing during a rail shipment between Wyoming and California last month, resulting in four separate investigations.
A railcar loaded with some 60,000 pounds of the chemical left Cheyenne, Wyoming on April 12, only to be found empty two weeks later at a rail stop in the Mojave Desert, according to a short incident report from the firm which shipped the ammonium, KQEDreports.

And of course, there's the usual-and-to-be-expected reference to ammonia nitrate and the Oklahoma City Bombing:

Quote:Ammonium nitrate is commonly used as fertilizer. It’s also an ingredient in high explosives and was used in the homemade bomb detonated in the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. (All emphases in the original)

However, the dirty little secret of the dirty and not-so-little ammonia nitrate bomb used in the Oklahoma City Bombing is that the brisance of ammonia nitrate is very low as explosives go, and thus, the mere 4,500 pounds of fertilizer was insufficient in brisance to bring down the B-3 column in the Murrah building by stress loading on that column. It was a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general, Benton K. Partin, whose specialty was explosive ordnance and damage assessment, who crunched the numbers and came to that conclusion. And that discomforting physics fact means that there had to have been demolition charges on that column (and probably on the others that failed), in order to account for the failure of the columns. The ammonia nitrate bomb simply didn't have the "oomph" to do it.  But it does have enough "oomph" to do some damage, particularly to non-reinforced structures (which the Murrah building was not).

Now comes what to me appears to be the narrative part, because I'm just not buying the explanation given in the article for the disappearance of the ammonia nitrate:

Quote:According to Dyno Nobel, the Ammonium - transferred in pellet form in a covered hopper car similar to those used to ship coal - must have fallen from the car on the way to a rail siding (where a short track connects with the main track) around 30 miles from the town of Mojave in eastern Kern County, in a city called Saltdale.

"The railcar was sealed when it left the Cheyenne facility, and the seals were still intact when it arrived in Saltdale. The initial assessment is that a leak through the bottom gate on the railcar may have developed in transit," said the company, adding that the two-week trip included multiple stops. They report having had "limited control" over the railcar operated by Union Pacific.

The railcar is being transported back to Wyoming for inspection.

Meanwhile, a representative for the Federal Railroad Administration says the investigation points to an improperly closed hopper car gate.

Now, wait just a minute... if the car was sealed in Cheyenne, if it had a leak, wouldn't the leak have been visible even in the yard in Cheyenne? And if the leak was sprung later while the train was en route, which, incidentally, "included multiple stops" on its two week journey, were no inspections done along the way? Wouldn't the Union Pacific officials have noticed a leak from the hopper car while it was sided in their yards? Union Pacific is a rather efficient railroad and they are, after all, the railroad that has been restoring steam locomotives to functionality and even using them on freight hauls. This expertise and expense does not, to me, signal the kind of lackadaisical attitude necessary for a hopper car full of ammonia nitrate to spring a leak, and then go unnoticed for two weeks.  Sorry, as of this moment and without further information, I'm not buying the narrative. Colour me Highly Skeptical.

And the same goes for the "improperly closed hopper gate." Presumably the hopper gate was improperly closed in Cheyenne, for the stops along the way would have no reason to open it. And again, we face the same problem here as well, because we're being asked to believe that the yardmasters and crews along the Union Pacific route taken by the hopper car over two weeks would never have noticed a leak and an improperly closed hopper gate. Even in modern dumbed-down thoroughly quackcinated Amairikuh, I find it difficult to believe that NO one noticed nor raised an alarm or alert.

So we end with an empty hopper car in a hamlet in Looneyfornia and a missing 30 tons of ammonia nitrate.
I do not know about you, but my high octane antennae are pulsing with suspicion.  I just cannot get it out of my mind that somewhere out there there's another "op" being planned with another McVeigh and another rented truck. Oklahoma City's ammonia nitrate bomb was only about two tons. Thirty tons of the stuff would be very bad, and if the two tons of the Oklahoma City bomb was a cover for some serious demolition charges, one has to wonder if, indeed the thirty tons was stolen by nefarious actors, and a if cover-narrative is being concocted ahead of whatever planned event they have in their evil diabolical heads, then what sort of real explosion might thirty tons of the stuff be a cover for?

... Unfortunately, none of my answers to that question are very good...
See you on the flip side...

Quote:Officials are early in their investigation but the leading theory is the disappearance resulted from a leak, and there is no indication the material was stolen.

(05-25-2023, 02:00 AM)Infolurker Wrote: Well,

Coincidently, there was a DHS bulletin today. 

DHS warns of attacks against government buildings, minority groups ahead of 2024 election

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/dhs-warns-attacks-government-buildings-minority-groups-ahead-2024-elec-rcna86067