kleinbl00:

Buddy of mine works for WET design, the company that does the fountains for the Bellagio and the Burj Khalifa, among others. They had some problems with the Burj in that there were too many twists and turns in the plumbing for the shooters (basically, a high-pressure capacitive pump the size of a school bus) to launch water the appropriate number of stories into the air. As all the plumbing was embedded in concrete, solutions needed to be found through modeling prior to getting out the concrete saw.

So they mocked up the twists and turns at their Burbank facility, dailed the equipment to operating pressure and set to modeling. Unfortunately, they didn't account for the fact that they had an excess pressure event nominally contained by concrete encasement.

My buddy was over 300 yards away when it blew. A chunk of stainless the size of a softball missed his head by about six inches. Work bought him a new tailgate and a new fender.

Water is an incompressible fluid. Ignore this fact at your peril.


posted 2974 days ago