So your equating corruption in modifying methane detection on underground mining equipment for extra profits with Texas's failure to tax the oil industry enough to fill the potholes that their trucks cause in the roads?

No but nearly every serious accident turns out to have been from cutting corners somewhere or other, and eventually it caught up to them.

I never did find out what caused the 18 wheeler fire. It could have been something like an axle bearing or even a transmission / drive shaft problem where the friction mile after mile caused lubricants to ignite, then that just spread to the fuel tanks. That stretch of road was actually smooth, and probably not the cause of the fire.

But it was spectacular and noisy.

Sometimes stuff happens.

Big accidents are usually both spectacular and noisy.

Like the ammonium perchlorate explosion out in the desert when solid rocket fuel accumulated while space shuttles were grounded after Challenger in 1986.

Or the gas plant explosion around Goldsmith about 30 years or so ago.

Then there was this explosion in November 1944 in the middle of a British countryside, that blew a crater out 400 feet deep and a half mile across. There were millions of bombs stored there on their way to the bases that launched the nightly raids on Nazi held facilities in Europe. One afternoon, something happened. No one really knows for sure, according to declassified reports, as any eyewitnesses instantly turned to "strawberry jam" and any physical evidence was launched tens of kilometers across the English farms and hedgerows at about 27x the speed of sound, and broken up into itty bitty pieces.

It was the biggest pre-nuclear age explosion, ever. It even dwarfed the Beruit harbor explosion, and a few other large non-nuclear accidents.

That is huge. Maybe that is where mysterious crop circles come from in fields

Showtalk said:

Maybe that is where mysterious crop circles come from in fields

Too small of a scale, no cratering of the earth. Some of the more convincing ones are actually done by people using lumber and rope.

https://www.livescience.com/26540-crop-circles.html

They should be able to records pranksters.

With phone spying of one's whereabouts all the time these days, combined with all the dash cams and other things, it's a lot harder to do anything secretly unless you take really extraordinary measures.

I've been giving more thought about mysterious sounds. I do recall one time a friend and I were hiking behind an old coal mine property where the thing caught on fire many decades earlier, As far as I know ,it's still burning underground. Pops and snap sounds are what I heard. Like a muzzled campfire made of pine. My friend couldn't hear a thing.I  always just figured he didn't clean the wax out of his ears.  Freshly fracked ground sounds about the same. I imagine people walking around areas without the right information could scare themselves silly.

BWArtist said:

I imagine people walking around areas without the right information could scare themselves silly.

About 50 years ago or so, we helped with a place for a couple of disadvantaged kids to stay when their dad had a heart attack and was going to be in the hospital for a while. Their son was in the same grade as me, but was very superstitious.

So about 2 AM the wind got up. Our phone cable connected to the house right outside that room. And there was this big tree out in the back yard. The wind of course swayed it back and forth, but one branch had grown out to where it would rub on the phone line. This made a squeaking noise that when coupled into the wall could be pretty loud.

Now I was quite accustomed to the squeaking at night. To me it was like a convenient meteorological wind detection device.

To him, it was a "ha'int" or some other supernatural phenomena, and when the squeaking got started up, he was in a total hysterical panic in a couple of minutes.

I finally went and turned on the outside floodlight, then took a flashlight and went outside, found a board next to the fence, and reached up and pushed the moving branch up off of the phone line. The noise abruptly stopped.

But it was disconcerting at 11 to 12 years old to have anyone at that age who still believed there were monsters that lurked in the shadows under a bed or in a closet, and was afraid of the dark, as I'd already become accustomed to utilizing the darkness as excellent cover to wander unobserved at about the age of maybe 7 to 8.