Renewable energy topples building

In this day and age of spouting the benefits of renewable fuels comes a story of a building that was toppled by exploding methane gas. A reminder of the potential dangers of harvesting waste gases happened in the Zhangjie City in central China late on Sunday when a cesspool filled with….well…excrement exploded, injuring 15 people and knocking down a residential building. Apparently the blast occurred after a local man sparked it by burning waste close to the cesspool which ignited the methane that was emanating from the pit, according to Xinhua news agency. Now, we know that the methane was just venting into the atmosphere, but it does go to show that there are many potential sources for harvesting renewable sources of energy apart from the obvious.

China has ‘enjoyed’ some of the fastest sustained growth rates in the world and the urban infrastructure has often been hastily built with little or no thought to the potential safety concerns that may arise as hundreds of millions of people have moved from the country to the town.

In yet another excrement-related story also from China, from Henan province comes a story of a man and his mother who both died trying to retrieve his wife’s phone that had been dropped into another septic tank. Apparently he jumped into the tank to try and locate it, and was overcome by fumes and died; later his mother died trying to save him. So it would seem that there is a huge potential in alternative gas supplies in China if only there was an infrastructure to harvest it. And you thought that this was just a motoring blog. 

image: metro.co.uk