Glad you had a good trip! Weddings are always such hectic, emotional affairs, despite everyone’s best intentions. Sounds like things were great.

I grew up just a mile or two from an oil refinery and had two related childhood fascinations. One was the “flaming smokestacks” which were very influencial in my childhood sci-fi imaginings. The other was the one occasion when one of the huge oil storage tanks caught afire. To give you perspective, their circular area was almost twice that of a football field, and there were nearly fourty of them ordered in rows and rows across a large (oddly enough) nature preserve, each one filled with oil. People were saying that if it had exploded, the resulting boom would have shattered windows within a five mile radius.

Of course, being a kid, I was rooting for the explosion to happen. Sadly for me (and probably me alone) it never did.

Wow! Did you grow up in Texas or summat? (Felicity thinks all oil refineries are in Texas—please bear with.)

How did they put the fire out? Did they evacuate anybody? I want to knoooooow.

I think the thing that bothered me most about Cleveland on this trip was the water. The Tualatin Valley Water District provides me with clean, drinkable water at home. However, in Cleveland, it is apparently necessary to add so much chlorine to the water that it tastes like drinking a swimming pool.

Checking the water quality reports for the two regions, I find that Cleveland only uses twice as much Chlorine as TVWD. I would have expected more like ten times, but perhaps I’m tasting something else.

I think Felicity and I spent something like $12 on bottled water on this trip.

BTW, pictures of the wedding are sitting on my camera. I’ll pull them off, scale them to a viewable size and post them at some point.

Welcome back. At some point someone is going to have to show me a picture of a smoke stack with a fire at the end, ive never seen one and find the thought to be quite alien. Hrmmmm.

lillis

You’ve seen a bunsen burner, right? It’s about like that, but bigger. I think the idea is to burn off waste methane (and other flamable gasses) from chemical processes. Methane is a major greenhouse gas, while CO₂ and water (the products of methane combustion) aren’t nearly as bad.

The first time I visited Cleveland, it was nighttime. The car came into view of the city, and there were two or three of those unholy torches burning into the filthy air. Vangelis immediately started playing in my head….

The pictures I took of the wedding are up on my site. Look for Ljung-Kugler Wedding.

Many of them are a wee bit underexposed. The chapel was too dimly lit to take photos with a reasonable shutter speed on my camera without sacrificing some exposure (I avoid the flash whenever possible). If I’d had a tripod (or an SLR), things would be better.

The bride and grooms’ names are Tracy and Eric. There are also a bunch of photos of other people who were at the wedding.

You know in movies when they have big smoke stacks with fires at the end? It looks something like that.

I may be paranoia girl, but I dun like saying people’s real names, esp. with last names, without their permission. As it’s my site, please consider that in future.

What’re you afraid of? Crazy people?

I could be wrong, but I think you have this wrong. CO2 is considered one of the most concerning greenhouse gases, and combustion (100%) of alkanes produces CO2 and water. Instead, I think the reasoning to these burners is to avoid acid rain, local chemical fallout, and other wonders of ejecting reactive, carcinogenic, poisonous, or otherwise dangerous substances onto an unwitting environment. So instead they are converted to a more common, if nonetheless undesired, product that will hopefully do less harm. Oh, and happily light the night sky and release heat as well.

Felicity: I know that some oil refineries were in place in NW Ohio, though there was rumor of shutdowns. I believe minor refineries are functioning in NY metro area and NJ, FL, and many other places. Some report I read in Aug 2000 suggested that at least 3 refinery sites were needed in the USA to maintain cost-effective delivery of petroleum products based on crude import and localized use factors.

I stand in utter awe of your Chem E knowledge.

Huh. NW Ohio. I don’t even really know what’s there. I only left Cleveland once (for a field trip), and all I saw was (geological stuff and) farms.

Of course, the scary part is that you might find real pictures of Tabor if you image-searched “moron”.