Massive explosion in Beirut

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by widebody911

You're older than I thought you were

Back when I was yer age .....


Wasn't actually there.
Massive explosion in the port.
A ship full of ammonium nitrate mixed with diesel or bunker fuel and something set it off.
leveled most of the city. Twice.

[porsche4life]

this article mentions that there was some sort of explosive material that had been seized and being stored there. Wonder what it was...

https://www.newsandguts.com/video/a-staggering-toll-after-massive-explosion-in-beirut/

[jyl]

Lebanese PM says due to 2.8 tons (edit: 2800 tons) of ammonium nitrate left unsecured for 6 years in a warehouse. 50+ dead, 3000+ wounded.

[cstreit]

Who stores 2700# of ammonium nitrate. Ext to a fireworks depot?!

[RWebb]

Lebanese

[Crowbob]

What does unsecured mean? They simply forgot about it?

Doubtful.

Somebody lit it off.

[mjohnson]

Originally Posted by cstreit

Who stores 2700# of ammonium nitrate. Ext to a fireworks depot?!

27xx TONS, not lbs - so maybe in modern WMD-speak 2 kilotons TNT-equivalent.

This is in the scale of Halifax and TX City from the last century. Or some of our tactical nukes set to "stun" but not "kill", at least according to the interwebs.

[Pazuzu]

Originally Posted by cstreit

Who stores 2700# of ammonium nitrate. Ext to a fireworks depot?!

Nevermind, I had all of my calculations wrong.
If Beirut is 2500 tons, West TX was 250ish tons, Texas City was 2500 tons, Oklahoma City was 2 tons.

West TX is consider 7-10 tons of TNT equivalent, so Beirut/Texas City would be 75-100 tons equivalent, maybe upwards of 200 (the calculations don't seem to be linear). Oklahoma City was called 2 tons equivalent, but I wonder if that is because it was a shaped charge.

[dewolf]

Originally Posted by masraum

I also read that a crew of firemen on site "disappeared" after the explosion. .

No sh$t....they're in orbit!!

[Tobra]

More likely vaporized, prop off a tanker will fly, body won't hold together.

[jyl]

Death toll has to be much higher than 70 or whatever they’re saying. What a disaster.

I didn’t think, even at first, that it was military. No conventional bomb is that powerful.

[cstreit]

This is the crater it left.

[masraum]

It's too bad this isn't larger, but also shows good before and after.



It's unfortunate that this, apparently, very substantially built building wasn't positioned more directly between the city and the epicenter of the explosion. It probably would have blocked a lot of the blast and stopped a bunch of damage and protected folks from injury or death.

[Pazuzu]

Originally Posted by jyl

Death toll has to be much higher than 70 or whatever they’re saying. What a disaster.

I didn’t think, even at first, that it was military. No conventional bomb is that powerful.

If it's possible to use the term "helpful", it was "helpful" that 180 degrees around the explosion was open water. 50% drop in casualties and destruction.

[GH85Carrera]

I was almost precisely 4.0 miles from the Oklahoma City Murrah building when a low life scum bag lit off a bomb. I was in a concrete tilt wall building. The perimeter of the building had large piers that the steel reinforced concrete wall sat upon and the walls had steel tabs embedded in them that were welded to each other. It was a very sturdy building designed to withstand up to a F4 tornado.

When the bomb went off, I was on the far corner of that building and the blinds in the window rattled from the building shaking. I honestly thought an 18 wheel semi tractor trailer going faster then he should had hit the back of the building. I ran down the hall expecting to see devastation and injured or dead employees. Everything was fine inside. So we all ran outside and expected to see a 747 had angered straight in close by. There was nothing.

We ran to the bosses office and turned on the TV and saw the reality and we all fell silent.

If that bomb in Beirut was 20 times bigger or even way more, it is just astonishing.

It truly makes anyone wonder why in heck would there ever be any reason to store that much material in a populated area. And even more so if it truly had been unsecured for years. 20-20 hindsight is always right but damn, that would be simply suicidal to have millions of dollars of fertilizer stored there. Why not sell it, or ship it away ASAP.

[Seahawk]

Those pictures are amazing. Looks like a series of concrete silos saved a lot more damage.

[Otter74]

Originally Posted by Pazuzu

Nevermind, I had all of my calculations wrong.
If Beirut is 2500 tons, West TX was 250ish tons, Texas City was 2500 tons, Oklahoma City was 2 tons.

West TX is consider 7-10 tons of TNT equivalent, so Beirut/Texas City would be 75-100 tons equivalent, maybe upwards of 200 (the calculations don't seem to be linear). Oklahoma City was called 2 tons equivalent, but I wonder if that is because it was a shaped charge.

According to the NYT article I was reading that mentioned it, the Texas City explosion was about 2000 tons of ammonium nitrate; this was about 2700 tons. So significantly larger, but not an order of magnitude larger.

I've watched the videos a bunch of times, and the explosion looks terrifying. As if Beirut and Lebanon haven't had enough s**t to deal with, with economic collapse, political crisis and COVID. The second factor surely goes a long way to help explain why such a huge amount of a dangerous material was stored so casually.

[berettafan]

Is that what the mangled tall concrete looking thing is in the foreground? What is that for?

[billybek]

Originally Posted by berettafan

Is that what the mangled tall concrete looking thing is in the foreground? What is that for?

Grain silo. There were already bread shortages before this incident.
Horrible damage and I bet their estimates of casualties are way off.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by billybek

Grain silo. There were already bread shortages before this incident.
Horrible damage and I bet their estimates of casualties are way off.

Right, I'm sure there we probably a bunch of folks that were essentially vaporized in the explosion.