Villagers Inflate Plastic Bags with Natural Gas to Carry Home

 

Shandong Binzhou villagers siphon off natural gas, carrying “bombs” home

February 20th, at an oil/gas well near the west end of Huanghe 12th street in Binzhou, Shandong Province, there were many villagers using large plastic bags to carry natural gas, a nerve-racking sight for many. The workers at the oil field stated that this indeed created many latent dangers, but their warning were to no avail.

On the morning of the 20th, when reporters first arrived, the oil extraction machinery was operating normally, a gas canister and large gas furnace were beside the machine with no people standing guard. At 10 am, a middle aged woman brought a large plastic bag to the machine. The woman skillfully opened the valve to the gas and connected it to the bag she was carrying, the plastic bag quickly rose and grew to be a 6 meter long, 1 meter wide balloon. After about 4 minutes the bag was full.

According to reports, there are more than one oil well in Binzhou; many other villages near oil/gas wells also had cases of villages self-filling gas. “Some villages directly connect the oil pipe to the village and divide it among the household. Once there was a power outage to the pipeline, uninformed villages continue to use gas to burn stoves, by the time the pipeline came back on, the rush of gas ignited the fires causing an explosion,” recalled an oil worker at Shengli Oil Field in Binzhou.

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