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At approximately noon local time on Saturday 15 March 2008, at an ex-military ammunition depot in the village of Gërdec in the Vorë Municipality, Albania (14 kilometers from Tirana, the nation's capital), U.S and Albanian munitions experts were preparing to destroy stockpiles of obsolete ammunition. The methodical destruction of the old ammo was supposed to occur with a series of small, controlled explosions, but a chain of events led to the entire stockpile going up at once. The main explosion, involving more than 400 tons of propellant in containers, destroyed hundreds of houses within a few kilometers from the depot and broke windows in cars on the Tirana-Durrës highway. A large fire caused a series of smaller but powerful explosions that continued until 2 a.m. on Sunday. The explosions could be heard as far away as the Macedonian capital of Skopje, away.〔(2 more dead found from Albania ammunition dump blast - ''International Herald Tribune'' )〕 Thousands of artillery shells, most of them un-exploded, littered the area. The blast shattered all the windows of the terminal building at the country's only international airport, and all flights were suspended for some 40 minutes. Some 4,000 inhabitants of the zone were evacuated and offered shelter in state-owned resorts. The Government declared the zone a disaster area. According to subsequent investigations, a privately managed ammo dismantling process was ongoing in the area. It killed 16 and injured 243. ==Possible causes== * A human error during the work, such as lighting a cigarette or damaging a fuse * Improper storage of the ammunition * The employment of untrained workers without the proper technical knowledge * Violation of the technical security rules in the area where the destruction of ammunition took place * Sabotage *Although existing technologies were employed and adapted for the operations at Gerdec, the techniques of ammunition disposal being used at the time were, and still are (in 2010), new technologies in this field. An error made by Engineers who designed the machinery the Demilitarisation company and associates employed on the project used. A fundamental design assumption made early in the design process rendered the basic machinery potentially lethal. Researchers and Designers of the ammunition disposal kilns assumed the combustible compounds within the ammunition would burn away at 350 degrees Celsius. Documents available from the US military state, and Thermochemical and Thermodynamic calculations will verify the combustible compounds within the ammunition being disposed of at Gerdec burn to give out a heat amounting to 4500 degrees Celsius. Such an energy would, without further sufficient and adequate designed machine components, lead to vaporization and explosion of the machines used to dispose of the ammunition dumps. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「2008 Gërdec explosions」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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