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Beirut

awkwardbydesign said:
And to think, we used to make bombs and rockets from fertiliser in the '60s! Just teenage entertainment, nothing sinister, just stupidity. But 2700 tonnes in a city? World class stupidity!
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Same here, used to mix aluminium powder with ammonium nitrate to melt steel, it was all quite harmless until they taught us molarity in chemistry, then it became dangerous.

Despite the world class stupidity of the Lebanese government it’s killed less people than our governments world class stupidity regarding CoVid.
 
awkwardbydesign said:
And to think, we used to make bombs and rockets from fertiliser in the '60s! Just teenage entertainment, nothing sinister, just stupidity. But 2700 tonnes in a city? World class stupidity!
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It's hard to equate what 2700 tonnes of explosives means in real life, but some of you/us will remember from School that '1 mole of gas occupies 24 litres at room temperature and pressure'. So 12g of carbon (about a heaped teaspoon) turns into 44g/24 litres of carbon dioxide gas if burned/detonated. That's about a 5000 fold increase in volume in milliseconds...

I trained as a chemist, and during my Ph.D I had a lab explosion with 0.5g of a fertiliser type material. It was enough to powder the glassware, blow out the windows, pick me up and throw me across the room.

One of my brothers had a close escape with an almost empty bottle of nail varnish remover got onto a bonfire he was tending. Again, about half a gram of material caused the fire to blow up in his face and some quite bad facial burns. I calculated later that the flame from hit his face at about 25,000 mph.

The biggest conventional bomb dropped in WW2 was Barnes Wallis' 'Grand Slam' aka the Earthquake bomb. Called the '10 ton bomb', it actually had a mere 6.7tons of explosive inside. It went through 30 foot concrete U-Boat pens.

2700 tonnes? There are nuclear weapons smaller than that.

No need for conspiracy theories, just monumental carelessness.
 
dadgad said:
The biggest conventional bomb dropped in WW2 was Barnes Wallis' 'Grand Slam' aka the Earthquake bomb. Called the '10 ton bomb', it actually had a mere 6.7tons of explosive inside. It went through 30 foot concrete U-Boat pens.
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Its ability to penetrate that much reinforced concrete was more due to it being a narrow, thick-forged steel walled tube with a lot of kinetic energy.

dadgad said:
No need for conspiracy theories, just monumental carelessness.
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Not even carelessness - I reckon no application of safety regimes at all.
 
dadgad said:
.

No need for conspiracy theories, just monumental carelessness.
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It's a possibility it was sabotage but I guess there is a lack of evidence due to the power of the explosion to ever find out. It was an open secret the stuff was there and ports are usually considered strategic targets.
 
dadgad said:
It's hard to equate what 2700 tonnes of explosives means in real life...

2700 tonnes? There are nuclear weapons smaller than that.

No need for conspiracy theories, just monumental carelessness.
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Yes that's a truly horrendous explosion. Back in the days of the troubles, the IRA used bombs made from enough Ammonium based fertiliser to fill a car boot, or a van. They were enough to take out a good part of a street. The thought of something like that factored up a couple of thousand-fold is just appalling.
 
Nero said:
Hang on, we haven't got our new satellites working yet!
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Imminently...

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-alan- said:
Yes that's a truly horrendous explosion. Back in the days of the troubles, the IRA used bombs made from enough Ammonium based fertiliser to fill a car boot, or a van. They were enough to take out a good part of a street. The thought of something like that factored up a couple of thousand-fold is just appalling.
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When they blew up the RUC station in Toome it shook the front windows in the house where we lived on the Magherbeg Rd, that's about 6-8 miles as the crow flies, I think that was 500lb of explosives, it left a hell of a crater in Toome as well, I was going to the Rainey in Magherafelt at that time and went through Toome twice a day on the bus.
I can't imagine what devastation a blast like that will have.
 
Seeker_UK said:
They do but 2750 tonnes of a powerful oxidizer is not what you'd normally store there. What's even crazier is that it's next to an explosives factory / store and other sources of fuel. Either they didn't think about that or didn't tell anyone.

Also, it decomposes over time; AIUI, the shipment that was there had been cooking in Middle East temperatures for several years.

Basically, p***-poor H&S practice and risk management. Not uncommon in the ME.
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Apparently it has been stored their since 2014
 
Many years ago I visited the Fauld crater with an ex-RAF armourer mate. Ok, we shouldn’t have been there, still very dangerous, but hey.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fauld_explosion

I really can’t imagine the forces at play in these big explosions. I’ve been around a few ounces of plastic explosives a few times when it has been detonated, and even that is shocking. There’ll be some people with ‘blast lung’ After this one in Beirut, I’m guessing.
 
Darren L said:
When they blew up the RUC station in Toome it shook the front windows in the house where we lived on the Magherbeg Rd, that's about 6-8 miles as the crow flies, I think that was 500lb of explosives, it left a hell of a crater in Toome as well, I was going to the Rainey in Magherafelt at that time and went through Toome twice a day on the bus.
I can't imagine what devastation a blast like that will have.
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Had a quick google there - the biggest of those fertiliser bombs ever used was an estimated 3000lb, loaded into one van.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_Science_Laboratory_bombing

God help the poor souls anywhere near that one in Beirut, a thousand times bigger.
 
Tony Lockhart said:
Many years ago I visited the Fauld crater with an ex-RAF armourer mate. Ok, we shouldn’t have been there, still very dangerous, but hey.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAF_Fauld_explosion

I really can’t imagine the forces at play in these big explosions. I’ve been around a few ounces of plastic explosives a few times when it has been detonated, and even that is shocking. There’ll be some people with ‘blast lung’ After this one in Beirut, I’m guessing.
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I'm forever seeing photographs of the surviving network of tunnels on Facebook forums, people still seem to get in there easily enough.
 
Ammonium nitrate is still the common blasting explosive used for mining in Australia (I worked for the explosives group of ICI Australia yonks ago). One of the saddest comments on the human race is that, when you want to kill someone with explosives, money is no object - military high explosive is very expensive. The commercial blaster blowing a pattern of 2000 holes in the Pilbara want as little of it as possible, just enough to set off the main charge of ANFO (ammonium nitrate fuel oil), and that as cheaply as possible. Ammonium nitrate cam make a serious bang.
 
eternumviti said:
I'm forever seeing photographs of the surviving network of tunnels on Facebook forums, people still seem to get in there easily enough.
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AIUI, they filled in the entrance again. It was only a matter of time before someone fell foul of the unexploded ordnance down there or a roof collapse.
 
Bloody hell, that sucking noise was eerie.

And no matter how many times I see videos of this explosion it still makes me jump.
 
A quick scan through and I see the "fact" that ammonium nitrate is explosive etc., repeated. IT IS NOT. On its own it is perfectly safe.

Ammonium nitrate is an oxidising agent and for it to go "bang", it needs something to reduce - a fuel, in the broadest sense. Hence the use mixed with fuel oil, as mining explosive.

Get sulphur or salt petre or powdered charcoal on their own and all three are no big deal, mix them together in the right proportions and you get gunpowder. SAME principle.

Stored away from a fuel, it would have been entirely safe, but 6-7 years stuck in a warehouse is a long time for things to go wrong, and then the fire close by to act as the detonator.
 
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