Accident in Beirut

[Snake Plissken]

I agree that 100 deaths, whilst every single one of them is a tragedy, would amount to a very lucky escape for an explosion of that size happening relatively downtown. As ever with these things, though, I'd anticipate that number continuing to rise.

The aerial shots show that the grain silos absorbed a hell of a lot that would have been heading in that direction too.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

(Yes, "equivalent to X tons of TNT" is what I'm talking about.)

Ammonium nitrate is apparently equivalent to 40% of the explosive power of tnt, if it explodes in ideal circumstances, so the upper bound for yesterday's explosion is about 1 kiloton. The explosion would have taken place in less than ideal conditions, so it will be a bit less than that but for reference, it's still likely bigger explosion than all of the high explosive bombs dropped on london during the blitz added together. (There were a lot of incendaries)

Apparently the global production of Ammonium nitrate is in the region of 20 million tonnes a year. It's a fucking miracle that this doesn't happen all the time.

[Nefertiti2]

Here's more about the ship it came from and the problems with dodgy owners and Flags of Convenience

https://twitter.com/Jane_Samuels/status/1291022911738978306?s=20

[S. aureus]

The mandatory pal guy has rather stretched the boundaries on his London map, at least (didn't check the New York one), which is irritating as a properly scaled one would still illustrate the point well.
(central London to the M25/M11 junction is about 16 miles, the outer red ring on the Beirut map is about 7 miles at the airport (South) or 9 miles on the coast to the North).

[ursus arctos]

I can't get the Manhattan map to load on my phone, but the island is 13.4 miles long from north to south

[Guy Profumo]

The mandatory pal guy has rather stretched the boundaries on his London map, at least (didn't check the New York one), which is irritating as a properly scaled one would still illustrate the point well.
(central London to the M25/M11 junction is about 16 miles, the outer red ring on the Beirut map is about 7 miles at the airport (South) or 9 miles on the coast to the North).

And of course, there's the munitions ship in the Thames (near Gravesend, IIRC) partially sunk since WW2 that's "too dangerous to salvage / recover" unless it becomes an active threat

[Guy Profumo]

Ammonium nitrate is apparently equivalent to 40% of the explosive power of tnt, if it explodes in ideal circumstances, so the upper bound for yesterday's explosion is about 1 kiloton. The explosion would have taken place in less than ideal conditions, so it will be a bit less than that but for reference, it's still likely bigger explosion than all of the high explosive bombs dropped on london during the blitz added together. (There were a lot of incendaries)

Apparently the global production of Ammonium nitrate is in the region of 20 million tonnes a year. It's a fucking miracle that this doesn't happen all the time.

Dropping incendiaries was a tactic.

Drop high explosive to fracture the gas mains, then the next waves incendiaries to set them alight.



See Coventry, Hamburg etc.

Of course, in Japan with its wooden housing had a higher incendiary mix from the start.

[ad hoc]

Plus they used napalm in Japan, just to make it about killing as many civilians as possible

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

So, not to be too fatalistic, the things on submarines that the orange one could decide to launch on a whim before the election to 'Make America Great Again' are 2,300 times more powerful than that? Fucking hell.

[Satchmo Distel]

Was Trump hinting the attackers were Muslim perchance (but not the nice Saudi ones)?

The Pentagon might be hoping Biden wins at this point.

[Guy Profumo]

Presumably the big white mushroom at the start of the big explosion is the water in the dock vapourising and being blasted by the shockwave?

[WOM]

No, it's just condensation from the air being compressed by the blast. You can see that it dissipates in seconds.

[Guy Profumo]

Thanks

[My Name Is Ian]

So, not to be too fatalistic, the things on submarines that the orange one could decide to launch on a whim before the election to 'Make America Great Again' are 2,300 times more powerful than that? Fucking hell.

I mean yeah, they're unimaginably powerful. The most powerful bomb, the Tsar Bomba, had a yield equivalent to 57 megatons. That's 50 times as powerful as the B83, more than 1,500 times as powerful as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs combined, and 10 times as powerful as all the munitions expended during World War Two combined. It was so destructive they couldn't even complete testing on it, and it would have been next to useless anyway. It was too big.

And the Tsar Bomba was designed to be twice as powerful as it ended up.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Plus they used napalm in Japan, just to make it about killing as many civilians as possible

I think when your plan is to burn down sixteen square miles of a city, the choice of weapon is kind of moot. I'm not sure it would have made an enormous difference if they had used thermite or white phosphorous, a fire storm is a fire storm

[Guy Profumo]

Plus they used napalm in Japan, just to make it about killing as many civilians as possible

Which Robert McNamara admitted.


"If we'd lost the war, we'd probably have been tried as war criminals for targetting civilians"

[Hot Pepsi]

War is murder.

[Gangster Octopus]

War is stupid.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Newsnight seems to have a pretty good handle on the source of the chemical. Apparently it was being transported from Georgia to Mozambique in 2013 when the shipped docked in Beirut with mechanical problems. The volatile cargo was unloaded and stored in poor conditions, the shipper washed their hands of it and the Lebanese authorities, despite warnings, failed to deal with what was almost literally a ticking bomb.

[ursus arctos]

This is good

https://twitter.com/ksadjadpour/status/1291416553779539968

[anton pulisov]

Apparently 2.5 tons of ammonium nitrate are in storage in a residential district in Paramaribo.

https://www.starnieuws.com/index.php...euwsitem/60035

[ad hoc]

10 times as much ammonium nitrate as was in Beirut is being stored in the port of Constanta, one of Romania's biggest cities.
https://www.digi24.ro/stiri/actualit...stanta-1352318 (in Romanian)

[Fussbudget]

Apparently 2.5 tons of ammonium nitrate are in storage in a residential district in Paramaribo.

https://www.starnieuws.com/index.php...euwsitem/60035

Do you mean 2,500 tons? Ammonium nitrate fertiliser comes in one tonne bags so I imagine there's plenty of farms that have more than 2.5 tons of it in storage.

[anton pulisov]

2500 yeah. Sorry.