Since people liked that one, my Dad also had another good engineering disaster story, though this one is pressure related, not electricity related.
He used to work for a company called James Hardie, that made asbestos cement sheeting. Part of the process involved baking the sheets in a huge autoclave, like the one pictured here [1] (note the size of the man). An autoclave is an oven, filled with high pressure steam.
One day the door blew off the autoclave. The door disappeared, and the autoclave itself acted as a rocket, about the size of a shuttle solid fuel booster. It sheared off the bolts holding it to its foundation, rocketed though the back wall of the factory and ended up in a body of water about a mile away.
He used to work for a company called James Hardie, that made asbestos cement sheeting. Part of the process involved baking the sheets in a huge autoclave, like the one pictured here [1] (note the size of the man). An autoclave is an oven, filled with high pressure steam.
One day the door blew off the autoclave. The door disappeared, and the autoclave itself acted as a rocket, about the size of a shuttle solid fuel booster. It sheared off the bolts holding it to its foundation, rocketed though the back wall of the factory and ended up in a body of water about a mile away.
[1] http://museumvictoria.com.au/collections/items/756810/glass-...