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The great butter and cheese fire of 1991(wisfarmer.com)

84 points by subroutine 3 days ago | 23 comments

Reminiscent of the Molasses Flood, though that was more tragic. Scale is a double-edged sword. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood

[–] doginasuit 21 hours ago

> the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), killing 21 and injuring 150 people.

That sounds truly horrifying. My intuition about molasses at that volume is all wrong.

[–] chuckadams 18 hours ago

And it even happened in January at that.

[–] rexskimmer 20 hours ago

That's shear-thinning non-Newtonian fluids for you.

[–] krapp 18 hours ago

Also see the Dublin Whiskey Fire[0] and the London Beer Flood[1] and maybe the Kentucky Meat Shower[2] as an honorable mention.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_whiskey_fire

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Beer_Flood

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_meat_shower

[–] pseudohadamard 3 hours ago

If it was in Europe they could have used to Milk Lake to put out the burning Butter Mountain.

[–] DicIfTEx 1 day ago

A devastating 1999 fire in a tunnel connecting France and Italy was also caused by a truck full of flour and margarine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel_fire

[–] Polizeiposaune 17 hours ago

A truck carrying 27 tons of Norwegian caramelized goat cheese caught fire in a tunnel in northern Norway in 2013; it burned for five days in part because the tunnel's liner was flammable...

https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/cheese-fire-causes...

Extensive repairs and upgrades were required -- it apparently took years before the tunnel was fully reopened to bidirectional traffic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aat0VskBS4A

[–] wewewedxfgdf 22 hours ago

A pity a sugar and vanilla truck were also not involved.

[–] ajb 1 day ago

Wacky stuff. I guess one development since then is the Vacuum Excavator, I think they only started being built in the 90s. So you could send some round to suck up the cheese, but I'm not sure there would be enough capacity in the area as they are a niche tool (for excavating around buried services).

[–] tonyarkles 1 day ago

I’m honestly just stuck thinking about that cleanup. Like… hydrovac is great, but how do you clean out a hydrovac truck filled with butter. And after you get it out, then what? In Madison they temporarily stored it in sanitary sewer holding ponds but that’s not a viable final destination. Does it eventually end up at the landfill?!

[–] ajb 1 day ago

I guess you would add it a bit at a time to the organic waste stream, at a low enough proportion that it doesn't swamp the system. At least, as long as it's not contaminated with stuff that would rule that out. Then, it probably goes to one of the waste burning power plants.

[–] pixl97 12 hours ago

>but how do you clean out a hydrovac truck filled with butter.

Steam or barely subcritical water.

[–] bell-cot 23 hours ago

Butter is mostly animal fat. Any reason it couldn't be sent down the same waste-processing stream as restaurant cooking grease?

[–] Xylakant 23 hours ago

Volume presumably, as well as being mixed with whatever byproducts of a burning warehouse.

[–] savolai 20 hours ago

You can actually make biodiesel from butter. It’s about 80–82% fat, so first you clarify it to remove the water and milk solids, then react the fat with methanol and a catalyst like sodium hydroxide. That gives you fatty acid methyl esters (biodiesel) and glycerol as a byproduct.

In theory, a kilo of butter could yield around 0.9 litres of biodiesel. The main problem, apart from the ridiculous cost, is that butterfat has a lot of saturated fatty acids, so the resulting fuel has pretty terrible cold-weather properties.

Of course in this case i suspect it was probably not quite pure.

[–] amelius 23 hours ago

This is why they never show robovac commercials with butter/grease as demonstration. It's always cereals and rice candy, and stuff like that.

[–] danparsonson 1 day ago

If it were my decision I would have found two gigantic slices of bread and made the world's biggest cheese sandwich - think of the tourism revenue!

[–] iamflimflam1 23 hours ago

Reminds me of a friend who, having watched a documentary on the subject, decided to recreate a custard powder explosion in his student kitchen…

[–] mauvehaus 20 hours ago

Being out on the trail for the Fourth of July one year, I celebrated by taking a handful of flour, rolling it up in a map, and blowing it across a campfire. You can make an impressive fireball with very little flour!

[–] jknoepfler 16 hours ago

Excellent holiday cooking inspiration.

[–] sandworm101 20 hours ago

We forget how much thermal energy lives in things like butter and flour. Butter has roughly the same energy by mass as high-grade coal. But who ever sees a truck full of butter as a fire hazard?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Blanc_Tunnel_fire (1999, 39 dead)

>> The fire burned for fifty-three hours and is estimated to have reached a temperature of 1,000 °C (1,830 °F), mainly due to the margarine load in the trailer, equivalent to a 23,000-litre (5,100 imp gal; 6,100 US gal) oil tanker

[–] ginko 1 day ago

Also: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunostbrannen