Quote:
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.
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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.