Saturday, March 18, 2006

Seminole Heights Goes Boom - We Hope Not!

Some interesting news about one of the major irritants in Susan's and my life and our dog's life. Irritants at least on every holiday. . . . and the days before and after the holiday . . . . and random days and nights in between. The people who cause hundreds of dogs to go on valium, or else face hiding under beds, running into closets and other panicked activities. The people who encourage thousands of Hillsborough County residents to engage in illegal activities.

The evil Galaxy Fireworks people. The people that the county commissioners kowtow to when it comes to enforcing laws against sales of such illegal goods.

Now it turns out they are a physical threat to Seminole Heights as storage depot for explosives.

"Last night the Variance Review Board denied Galaxy Firework's request for a variance to allow them to keep their Barbed Wire. It turns out all those
trailers they have at the corner of Florida and MLK are full of fireworks.
That is their storage location. It also turns out that it is against Code
for them to store fireworks. They are zoned only for a retail store, which
they have, and additional parking, which they have. Because they explained
about the storage under oath, Code and the fire department are checking it out."

A few years ago the building behind them burned down. We were lucky then that it did not spread to the stored fireworks.

Should this be reported to Homeland Security? What if a terrorist wanted to cause some trouble that would be unexpected, they might go to each of these consumer explosives depots and put some C-4 on the sides of the trailers and simultaneously explode them. We did not expect planes into the sides of buildings. We would not expect this either. Should these storage depots be away from any residential areas and have greater security?

Added Note: From the comment by August Vdd

From Wikipedia:

"The Enschede fireworks disaster, called Vuurwerkramp (Literally, "fireworks disaster") in Dutch, was caused by a fire which broke out in the S.E Fireworks depot on May 13, 2000 in the eastern Dutch town of Enschede. The fire led to an enormous explosion that left 22 people dead and thousands of families homeless. The extent of the damage was estimated at half a billion euros.

The fire started in the work area of the central warehouse where some 900 kg of fireworks were stored. The fire extended to two full containers that had been placed illegally outside of the building. Since the fire department could not contain the fire initially, it was able to spread to a third container, which exploded shortly afterwards. A chain reaction of explosions eventually led to the ignition of the firework bunker. As a result the surrounding residential area was virtually destroyed. "

Video footage of Enschede explosion

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is video of what happened in a small town in the Netherlands (Enschede) when a fireworks depot exploded.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6126121898177679789&q=explosion

Just type "Enschede fireworks disaster" in Google and see why it's a bad idea to mingle firework depots and neighborhoods.

Anonymous said...

"should this be reported to homeland security?"

sometimes I can't tell when you are joking or just incredibly asanine.

Anonymous said...

Well, I'd be more concerned if I saw a member of the Trib's senior editorial/publishing staff around there holding a match. That would be one way to solve the Central Tampa problem!

(And, for the poster above, I am indeed just joking.)

Bungalowlady said...

This inappropriate use of the trailers for storing fireworks has been reported to Code, Zoning, and the fire marshal. No one knew they used those trailers to store fireworks until they admitted it at the variance hearing. South SH and OSHNA are both complaining. I don't know about SESH. Since it is located on the border of South and Old SH, we are thw two neighborhoods most effected.