If a steam boiler blows up, all that super heated steam is exposed to whatever room the boiler is inside of.

Steam always expands, pretty much instantly. Thats how we use steam to power shit.

So if a whole boiler blows up, all that steam will fill the space, and will literally boil flesh off your bones as soon as it hits you, but you still take minutes to die from the shock and lungs scarring over. Like, they recover dead bodies and there’s a trail of soup behind them where they were trying to get safety.

It is like the horror story in an engine room, worst case scenario. Even if you managed to survive, 3rd degree burns all over your body.

When I was in the Navy ours blew while I was looking at it, maybe from 20 feet away. Luckily it was the only part of it that was compressed air and not steam that exploded. Probably way less than a 1% chance, a different part should have failed first because they were at higher pressures.

But I still saw/felt/heard the explosion, and since the insulation was pink, it made a giant pink cloud that expanded as fast as steam would have, and me and the guy next to me legit didn’t know why or how we were still alive.

Whole engine room got evacuated, like 5k people in the hanger bay thinking it was just a drill because we’d just pulled into port after deployment.

And I started a relatively controlled stampede by screaming that the boiler had really just exploded and we were all standing directly above it.

Was some pretty crazy shit, and I fully expected to die when that shit blew. The pink cloud just broke my brain and I’ll never forget it. Completely and totally unexpected.