Re: Monster explosion in Beirut

[Kiwias]

Utterly horrific.

[Ymx]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion.

I’m sure more info will come through.

I’m not really buying the fireworks factory.

That explosion was huge and uniform.

[Gumboot]

Utterly horrific.

Just terrible. Mind-boggling level of destruction. Apparently some airport buildings were damaged about 10km away from the blast.

[dkm57]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

[Guy Smiley]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion

[Guy Smiley]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

They use ANFO in mining... the place I work at fired a shot the other week that used about 30tonnes to bring down about 80 000tonnes of rock. Some of the material has been reduced to an almost sand sized particle.

Pulverised.

3 000tonnes going off?

Hellish.

[Oxbow]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion.

Um, no.

[Kiap]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion.

Um, no.

What fraction ... 20%?

[Gumboot]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

I think that's the same shit Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

[Oxbow]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion.

Um, no.

What fraction ... 20%?

No idea without Googling, as large as it was, it just clearly wasn't anywhere near a nuclear explosion.

[robmatic]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

Stored next to a grain silo, which in itself is a fire risk, and next to the fireworks or whatever it was that was popping off before the big blast.

Also, six years without it getting shifted.

[Guy Smiley]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

I think that's the same shit Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Yup

[MungoMan]

Horrendous, just under 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate which was confiscated in 2014 and stored in a warehouse in a built up port.

Everything about this defies belief. Poor, poor people.

I think that's the same shit Timothy McVeigh used in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Yup

Since making ammonium nitrate depends on a cheap and plentiful supply of natural gas as a chemical input, I'm wondering if one of the gulf states was the source of the AN that had supposedly been warehoused at the Beirut port for many years. And relatedly, wondering why it was offloaded and not subsequently claimed.

Removed from a shitbox rustbucket and not claimed because neither the owner of the commodity nor the carrier considered it commercially sensible to claim it, pay whatever charges were due and move it on?

[Kiap]

Um, no.

What fraction ... 20%?

No idea without Googling, as large as it was, it just clearly wasn't anywhere near a nuclear explosion.

I'm going with a wet finger number at 20% of Hiroshima.


Nukes vary anyway. Some are small.

[A6D6E6]

That’s like a Hiroshima level of explosion.

I’m sure more info will come through.

I’m not really buying the fireworks factory.

That explosion was huge and uniform.

It was a big explosion, but let's not get hyperbolic. The Hiroshima explosion killed over 50,000 people and levelled almost an entire city. The Beirut blast, whilst big, doesn't even seem to be on the same scale as the Halifax Explosion (and for comparison, the Hiroshima explosion was equated to about 10 times the Halifax explosion)

[Oxbow]

What fraction ... 20%?

No idea without Googling, as large as it was, it just clearly wasn't anywhere near a nuclear explosion.

I'm going with a wet finger number at 20% of Hiroshima.

My very rough calculations say you're about right with that number.

[Raggs]

Some photos emerging of what appears to be the warehouse, with the 1 ton sacks type things.



Seems to be from this:



2013, confiscated 2,750 tons of it, and it's been sat there waiting to be disposed of.

[Enzedder]

Well, that got rid of it.

McVeigh used 2 tons of the stuff and the devastation was massive. This was 2750 tonnes.

[mat the expat]

Check out the building folding back at around 33Seconds and the car getting it's windows punched out:

[Nols]

Why would anybody store anything that devastating in a populous area? No doubt there’s an answer - I just can’t imagine what it is.

Yeah, boggles the mind that you'd store it in the middle of a population centre. Also, just the sheer quantity. If you want to stockpile lots of extremely dangerous material then split the caches up, FFS.

I suppose Lebannon is not wealthy etc, so things may not always be done with the best practces.

[mat the expat]

I suppose Lebannon is not wealthy etc, so things may not always be done with the best practces.

Or knowledge, sadly

[Yeeb]

I suppose Lebannon is not wealthy etc, so things may not always be done with the best practces.

Or knowledge, sadly

Yup, probably this. If the harbour storage bloke doesn’t happen to know that under certain conditions that stuff can explode, then he’s not going to store is safely away. Could just be that an unrelated fire set off some other things , which looked like fireworks , but it all acted as a primer ignition for the amonnium nitrate.

You’d hope that this was a wake up call for the rest of the world, but sadly I think lessons won’t be learned and that certain things will continue to be stored dangerously next to other things that could set off the whole thing.

Isn’t that stuff normally quite safe to transport provided it’s airtight sealed containers and not heated ? Trying and failing to recall my GCSE chemistry here.

[mat the expat]

It's quite likely it was completely forgotten/lost in a paper trail.

I bet there are some nervous logistics people checking locations right now

[Nols]

I've done numerous chemical lab safety inductions over the years as part of my job/studies and one of the main messages is that incidents tend to happen because of a combination of factors. Human error through ignorance or taking shortcuts, compounded by various other things which results in stuff catching fire or going boom. Sheer bad luck usually plays a part in escalating something to becoming much more serious.

Presuming the details about the ammonium nitrate storage is accurate, this is like a case study where everything is dialled up to 11. Highly explosive material stored in huge quantities, terrible storage conditions, no maintenance, beside other high risk sites, beside a population centre, probably a poorly educated workforce involved with shitty work practices/standards.

Fucking hell.

[Yeeb]

There was an episode of a shit comedy programme Brittas empire, where a list of seemingly unrelated decisions made a giant bomb - was something like:
Some leftover weed killer thrown into the bin
Then some deodorant cans from leftover changing room lost and found
Then some straw
Then some kids toys with ball bearings in
Finally some bottles on the top, through which the suns rays focussed and ignited the straw etc

[Ymx]

Check out the building folding back at around 33Seconds and the car getting it's windows punched out:

And how far away is that footage !?!

The number of deaths surely must be higher than reported

[Nols]

Isn’t that stuff normally quite safe to transport provided it’s airtight sealed containers and not heated ? Trying and failing to recall my GCSE chemistry here.

[Yeeb]

Yup, so the stuff comes in one tonne sealed sacks - nothing inheritantly dangerous there.
But if just out of shot there are boxes of fireworks, or wax candles , and some chap is doing some welding very badly ....

The bad welding + stacks of candles burnt down a large warehouse in Durban a few years ago - will try find a pic

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.thesou ... ire-video/



https://www.ecr.co.za/news/news/2017-ye ... ned-black/

[Biffer]

No idea without Googling, as large as it was, it just clearly wasn't anywhere near a nuclear explosion.

I'm going with a wet finger number at 20% of Hiroshima.

My very rough calculations say you're about right with that number.

My back of a fag packet says it would be less than that.

2500 tons of fertiliser. Fertiliser has about 0.4 the explosive energy of TNT, so equivalent to 1000tonnes I.e. 1 kiloton.

Hiroshima was 15 kiloton.

Additionally the explosion probably didn't take all the fertiliser, what with age and it not being set up to deliberately blow.

So about 5% is my guess.

[MungoMan]

I suppose Lebannon is not wealthy etc, so things may not always be done with the best practces.

Or knowledge, sadly

Yup, probably this. If the harbour storage bloke doesn’t happen to know that under certain conditions that stuff can explode, then he’s not going to store is safely away. Could just be that an unrelated fire set off some other things , which looked like fireworks , but it all acted as a primer ignition for the amonnium nitrate.

You’d hope that this was a wake up call for the rest of the world, but sadly I think lessons won’t be learned and that certain things will continue to be stored dangerously next to other things that could set off the whole thing.

Isn’t that stuff normally quite safe to transport provided it’s airtight sealed containers and not heated ? Trying and failing to recall my GCSE chemistry here.

IIRC, ammonium nitrate is transported under the classification Dangerous Goods (oxidising agent) rather than Explosives, reason being it needs a fair bit of provocation to go bang. The latter is borne out by the simple fact that farmers etc who use an ammonium nitrate / fuel oil (diesel) mix (i.e. ANFO) to blow up stumps, rocks etc need more than a detonator and a means of initiating it to make the ANFO explode. They also need a booster since ANFO isn’t detonator-sensitive under normal circumstances.

Intense fires and / or minor explosions aren’t normal circumstances, mind you...

[fishfoodie]

The USCSB video on the fire & explosion in West Texas, if you want to see what a 30 Tonne AN explosion looks like; & it also contains a nice simple explanation of how the soot from a fire, & exposed AN, is a disastrous combination.

[Lobby]

Interesting thread here explaining how the AN came to be in Beirut port

https://twitter.com/DavidVidecette/stat ... 0012167168

[Ymx]

The USCSB video on the fire & explosion in West Texas, if you want to see what a 30 Tonne AN explosion looks like; & it also contains a nice simple explanation of how the soot from a fire, & exposed AN, is a disastrous combination.

So 100 times that.

Jebus.

[Uncle fester]

Or knowledge, sadly

Yup, probably this. If the harbour storage bloke doesn’t happen to know that under certain conditions that stuff can explode, then he’s not going to store is safely away. Could just be that an unrelated fire set off some other things , which looked like fireworks , but it all acted as a primer ignition for the amonnium nitrate.

You’d hope that this was a wake up call for the rest of the world, but sadly I think lessons won’t be learned and that certain things will continue to be stored dangerously next to other things that could set off the whole thing.

Isn’t that stuff normally quite safe to transport provided it’s airtight sealed containers and not heated ? Trying and failing to recall my GCSE chemistry here.

IIRC, ammonium nitrate is transported under the classification Dangerous Goods (oxidising agent) rather than Explosives, reason being it needs a fair bit of provocation to go bang. The latter is borne out by the simple fact that farmers etc who use an ammonium nitrate / fuel oil (diesel) mix (i.e. ANFO) to blow up stumps, rocks etc need more than a detonator and a means of initiating it to make the ANFO explode. They also need a booster since ANFO isn’t detonator-sensitive under normal circumstances.

Intense fires and / or minor explosions aren’t normal circumstances, mind you...

Couple of things probably went wrong here.

• AN can absorb water from air if not well packed. This could cause it to partially liquify.

• It can explode on it's own but would need to be exposed to a lot of heat and/or fuel mixtures. AN terrorist bombs typically mix AN with diesel or even sugar.

• So nearly 3000 tonnes of AN stored in poor conditions and there was probably a primary explosion or fire that applied sustained heat + mix fuel in that caused the AN to go up. That's the secondary explosion.

• Calcium Ammonium Nitrate is a safer alternative but can still be converted to AN by folks determined enough to do so.

[Oxbow]

Trump as sharp as ever.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/ ... ef=uk-news

[robmatic]

I'm still confused by all the minor explosions and bangs in the fire before it all went up. Were they really storing fireworks in the same building?

[Hong Kong]

Top photo - oaklahoma city bombing, 2.5 tonnes of the shite

Bottom photo, Beirut, with 2.7k tonnes

[Hong Kong]

And in a “lighter” mode

[Lemoentjie]

I hope the Hiroshima comparisons aren't serious, it's evidently not even close to being the same. A nuclear explosion is a flash, then you're gone.

It will be interesting to see how the 'health and safety gone mad' groups react to this, because things like this is exactly why health and safety exists.

[Jock42]

And in a “lighter” mode

The 2 sides of social media. A little bit of entertainment but some lizard gets to air their ridiculous opinion.