Beirut Explosion

DA SWO said:
Lebanon is on the metric system, right?
So wouldn't 2750 METRIC tons be slightly more than 6000 English tons? 6Kt explosion?
@racing_kitty
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Perhaps. I haven’t dug around to determine whether it was metric or not. I’m not the one who did the calculations, and I wasn’t double checking math, equivalents and K factors at 0230. I have to be to work shortly, so any further data mining is at least 10hrs away For me.
 
CQB said:
I heard a snippet that the fire fighters have just disappeared.
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These are the numbers I've seen but I doubt they're accurate - death toll seems very low:
Beirut explosion: death toll rises to 135 as about 5,000 people are wounded – as it happened

Given the size of the fire they were working, etc. they could've easily lost almost 135 in firefighters alone. Causalities were probably reduced given it occurred in a port area but, given the videos above, it still seemed to be a heavily populated area.

Makes me wonder how incredible the Halifax blast in 1917 must've been. Crazy stuff.
 
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I know precisely didly squat about explosives, minus The stuff I played with as a kid. But I do know what they do to people. The death toll from it will be extraordinary, and for most of it it will be by deductive reasoning because there will not be body parts to find in many cases, just relatives and friends who won't show up anymore.
 
Most of that AN hasn't gone off for mine, it's been burned off in the big fire ball, I don't think that's a 2700tn crater. A big lump of it has melted in the fire and got to a point where it could detonate, but not all of it. After 6 years in a humid port, that Pril would have been hard as a rock, not nice free flowing AN.
I reckon all of those people on the peninsular behind the silos would be pretty happy that was there today, things could have been 25% worse.
That's my 14 years of making ANFO and other AN based bulk explosives take on it.
 
digrar said:
Most of that AN hasn't gone off for mine, it's been burned off in the big fire ball, I don't think that's a 2700tn crater. A big lump of it has melted in the fire and got to a point where it could detonate, but not all of it. After 6 years in a humid port, that Pril would have been hard as a rock, not nice free flowing AN.
I reckon all of those people on the peninsular behind the silos would be pretty happy that was there today, things could have been 25% worse.
That's my 14 years of making ANFO and other AN based bulk explosives take on it.
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And here I was going to suggest, the good news is they no longer have to worry about the ammonium nitrate storage...
 
We were talking about this in the office today. I can totally see how this could be simply bureaucratic issue: you have all this stuff that's kind of in bureaucratic limbo, no one really wants to deal with it, there are some legal questions, but at the same time it might be useful somehow. I could either sell it as fertilizer, or as ANFO components for my Hez friends. #win either way.

Then, over time, we kind of forget about it, because hey it's Lebanon and yeah, we have issues. Then, one day, boom. :(
 
DA SWO said:
Long term injuries will also take a toll. Organs damaged by blast or over pressure will slowly fail.

Remember this shit next time someone tells you safety standards or standards in general are white supremacy and need to be eliminated.
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I've never heard that safety standards are white supremacy, so that's a new one.

I do, however, have a bunch of libertarian friends who like to argue things like OSHA/EPA/other regulatory bodies are worthless because "the market will dictate safety"; they've all been super quiet about it since yesterday.
 
Marauder06 said:
We were talking about this in the office today. I can totally see how this could be simply bureaucratic issue: you have all this stuff that's kind of in bureaucratic limbo, no one really wants to deal with it, there are some legal questions, but at the same time it might be useful somehow. I could either sell it as fertilizer, or as ANFO components for my Hez friends. #win either way.

Then, over time, we kind of forget about it, because hey it's Lebanon and yeah, we have issues. Then, one day, boom. :(
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From what I saw while I was there, I'd say that it is extremely likely that is what happened.
 
As an idea of what 2700tn of AN looks like.

1596666567553.jpeg

These ^ are 1200kg bulka bags of AN, or 1.2tn bags, or 2645lb bags for the metric phobic.

homeImage.jpg


This stack in front is about 216 tn that we can see, it probably goes back a bit further. About 8% of what was supposed to be in that shed.
 
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