Can water pressure really equal 200 tons of dynamite?

[Larry Heflin]

Washington Post quotes water transmission lines
"highly pressurized pipes that can explode with the force of 200 tons of dynamite"
have they dropped a decimal point here?
Thats a lot of dynamite!

It's been years since I've tried such calculations and now couldn't even try...

 

[SteamKing]

Journalists and numbers don't mix well, in my experience. That's why they became journalists in the first place.

 

[Aero51]

What is the context of the "pressurized pipes"?

 

[Larry Heflin]

Carrying drinking water: up to about 77" diameter. Buried, usually beneath streets and sometimes in tunnels in soil or in rock up to some 150' deep. Mostly reinforce4d concrete: rarely steel. Pumped to water-towers and distribution.

 

[etudiant]

There is a video of a Russian hydro facility that was devastated by exploding pipes because the operator mismanaged the water flow to the turbines. The damage did not seem that far out of line with hundreds of tons of dynamite. See:

 

[russ_watters]

It would surprise me if aqueducts operated at anywhere close to the pressure of a hydro plant, but even if they did, it would be tough to characterize the rupture as an "explosion". More like a flash flood.

 

[AlephZero]

I once actually heard an explosion estimated at about 15 tons of TNT = 12 tons of dynamite. I was 20 miles away from where it happened and working underneath my car at the time. The bang was lound enough that people came out of the house, thinking the car had fallen off the ramp on top of me or something similar.

I don't think a failed dam would come anywhere near that sort of "explision", let alone 200 tons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flixborough_disaster

 

[Aero51]

Do you happen to have any pump information? From the info you've given me we can only determine the hydrostatic portion. If you had the power output we would have a rough estimate of the operating pressure.

 

[Larry Heflin]

Thanks...but this is a quote from a facilities report...later quoted in the Washington Post...which I suspect is overblown (?) to excite the populace and politicians to require a setback from the pipes. I suspect a setback from a two hundred ton explosion would be unnecessarily costly.