Pretty, isn’t it? This is what happens when a single road tanker decides to spill its guts. And frankly, they got off lightly. It could have been far worse, because ammonia doesn’t negotiate—it kills. It kills everything. It’s such an efficient executioner that whatever it touches ends up sterilized, wiped clean as if nature hit a hard reset.
These people were lucky: they escaped, and emergency crews were on-site fast. But keep your perspective straight—this was just a road tanker. What did it carry? Maybe 40 cubic meters of liquid ammonia, which expands into a massive cloud of toxic gas the moment it’s released.
Now compare that to a small ammonia tanker at a harbor. Those “small” ships load roughly a thousand times that volume. And they don’t sit politely offshore; they crawl deep into harbors, snake up river mouths, and park themselves next to hinterland facilities tucked right inside densely populated cities. A thousandfold payload. In the middle of people’s homes. Their schools. Their lives.
And remember: some of that ammonia doesn’t just gas out—it leaks into the water, too. That alone would sterilize an entire harbor basin and plenty beyond it. On land, the gas cloud would sweep through neighborhoods and wipe out entire populations before most people even understood what hit them. That’s not an incident. That’s a calamity.And these are just the “small” ships. We’re not even talking about the oceangoing giants yet—those floating catastrophes-in-waiting dwarf everything mentioned above.