A Fuel Explosion Leveled a Massive Engineering Plant. It Shouldn't Have Been Possible.

Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:in 1988, a series of mysterious explosions burned down the PEPCON plant, which produced ammonium perchlorate for solid rocket fuel. The actual explosions were determined to have been caused by a spark from a welder’s tool heating highly reactive aluminum drums of the fuel, which then detonated. Ammonium perchlorate is a high-performance oxidizer—unreactive on its own, it will set off a chemical reaction that releases oxygen in a blast of fire when added to burning fuel. While flames sometimes sprang up in the plant, ammonium perchlorate is soluble in water, which extinguishes it on contact. Instead, the last explosion had gone off in a storage space densely packed with aluminum drums of ammonium perchlorate (aluminum is highly reactive).