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Holy ****. 😞
That's awful, I genuinely wasn't expecting that.
Holy shit, that is terrifying.
The BBC is giving no explanation. That looked like a very professionally executed strike.
Made me feel sick to be honest. Reports of there being an aircraft flying very low overhead immediately before first explosion.
Dreadful stuff.
fireworks factory?
Looks like some FW's going off before the blast, add in some nitrates.
There have been problems simmering in the background for a while, but seeing somewhere like Lebanon regress (with all they have experienced in the past) is very sad.
Let's hope they can put the lid back on this situation.
It's not as if the US or UK has any statesmen worthy of the name in a position to help.
Crikey! Mini mushroom cloud!
Reported on radio on way home - talk of firework factory in the port, or munitions store, also local reporter talking of low flying jet just prior to explosion but bloody hell that's big. Wasn't expecting that.
Thoughts and prayers - going to be a big death toll with that size explosion
No chance is that a firework explosion.
Apparently it was a store of sodium nitrate confiscated from a ship that exploded, horrific blast.
Fuel-air bomb?
Initial charge to put the vapour out, then a massive second explosion when the fuel-air mix ignites?
Isn't that how the 'daisy cutters' the US used in Afghanistan work?
If you were aiming to drop a bomb from a jet, what better target than a flour silo or fireworks factory or chemical storage: amplify your payload and pass the buck
That shockwave. Horrifying.
No chance is that a firework explosion.
Have a look at the footage from the Chinese one that blew up.
Ammonium nitrate silo is the other option.
EDIT that brown/orange smoke in the video may be a giveaway for some ammonium nitrate involvement.
That explosion is HUGE! Don't remember seeing anything near that scale being shown on the news before. There are cars that have been flipped over, whole warehouses striped to just a very wonky frame! That's terrible! Can that amount of damage be from an accident in a firework factory or even a terrorist DIY device? or does point towards proper military grade weapons being used?
EDIT: just seen the images from the Chinese firework factory that blew up! holy crap I can't believes any would think its fine to have that much stuff that blows up in one place that (outside of an ammunition store!).
live on AlJazeera tv, huge destruction all around and many casualties, and as per usual, some silly responces on Google streetview reviews of the silos.
I liked working in Beirut - in one of the few times recently where people haven't been fighting each other. Really friendly and welcoming.
That is a massive explosion and will have affected buildings for miles around.
Really sad to see this 🙁
Another angle here:
https://twitter.com/kingashu1008/status/1290695116844175362?s=20
Looks horrific - this is from a different angle
https://twitter.com/BissanCampaigns/status/1290671086951161856
Bloody hell. You'd need hundreds of tonnes of stuff for a blast like that, must surely be an industrial accident not military. Dreadful.
Reports of the blast being felt in Cyprus!
Only heard about this disaster via this thread.... Watched the first video above, saw the first few seconds of the white smoke and thought jeez that’s awful.... Then the unexpected big explosion happened. ****
Reminds me of AZF Toulouse 20 years back. In that case it was 400 tonnes of ammonium nitrate amongst other things. About a thousand people still have hearing damage. Seisometers recorded an earth quake of 3.5. It's never been proven what caused the blast, one possibility is a métiorite!
One of the videos popped up on a WhatsApp group I'm in with no explanation other than "Fireworks". Was totally unprepared for what happened.
That is going to be one hell of a lot of lives lost. Thoughts with everyone out there.
It's absolutely horrific, the Lebanese Red Cross has reported 2,200 casualties so far
That mushroom cloud was one distinctive colour, I bet a few chemical experts around the world know exactly what it was that went boom
Bloody hell. You’d need hundreds of tonnes of stuff for a blast like that, must surely be an industrial accident not military. Dreadful.
I don’t think there’s a conventional weapon capable enough.
Reminded me of reading about the Halifax explosion.
The red of the smoke means nitrogen byproducts so probably either amonium nitrate or sodium nitrate. Based on the damage radius in some of the videos some experts (actual relevant ones) on twitter think approx equiv of 240 tons tnt. This roughly corresponds to the reports from semisgraphs that are coming out.
The big grain silo that just got obliterated handles 70%ish of the entire countries grain too.
Terrible.
very similar to SS John Burke. Ammunition ship hit by a Kamakazi..
That's black smoke not red, Klunk. Here's a link to the smoke in Toulouse from mainly ammonium nitrate:
http://www.ici-grenoble.org/agenda/evenement.php?id=5027
Ports tend to be organised by type of activity, Ammonium nitrate fertilizer near to grain towers is logical.
I was alluding to the scale and the shock wave, not the smoke colour and given most munitions would be made with nitrates/nitrations.
Horrific, utterly horrific.
Hmmm.. the white flashes before the big bang look like munitions flashing off.
I'm thinking more a munitions dump?
Shock wave was enormous!
What would be a reason for storing such large quantities of ammonium nitrate? Given the large fire you’d hope a well managed port would evacuate. Although it was so big you’d have been evacuating a fair few km. Not a nice moment for Lebanon.
Horrendous situation.
Having visited twice over the past few years, Lebanon will always have a place in my heart. The locals were very hospitable, loads of history and just a super place to visit. My thoughts are with all in Beirut.
They are reporting 2700 tonnes of ammonium nitrate went up. Had been stored for 6 years.
That is an unreal amount to explode and I hope not but there will surely be a huge number of deaths
For context, the Oklahoma City bombers used about 2 tonnes; that was enough to destroy 1 building and damage 286 others.
Scale that up to 2,750 tonnes.
Being reported that the warehouse was 'unsecured'.
do we know how long the the initial fire was burning for ? going by the released video clips it can't have been very long you would have noticed a blaze like that if it had been burning a while.
From a CNN report:
“There were conflicting reports on what caused the explosion, which was initially blamed on a major fire at a warehouse for firecrackers near the port, according to Lebanese state news agency NNA.
The director of the general security directorate later said the blast was caused by "high explosive materials confiscated years ago," but did not provide further details.
An investigation into the explosion was announced by Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab. The probe will include "revelations that will be announced about this dangerous warehouse which has been present since 2014," he said, without providing any additional details.
CNN's Ben Wedeman reported that authorities think a large amount of ammonium nitrate seized from a ship in 2013 or 2014 may have caused the blast.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/middleeast/beirut-explosion-port-intl/
The first I knew of this was a Flipboard article I spotted about four hours ago, I hadn’t seen any news at all, and the scale of the actual blast was shocking, the shockwave looked like a nuke!
Reports are saying that the port has been destroyed. Just shocking. 🙁
Looking at the pictures on the guardian live feed is just stunning.
massive warehouses vanished and the size of the crater is huge
AP this morning were saying that Lebanon imports 80% of their grain through that port and the grain silos at that port were holding about 85% of their yearly stock.
The pictures of the docks area show part of the dock wall just, well, gone and a massive crater filled with water. Quite aprt from medical help for the immediate victims, they are going to need a lot of help to make the port capable of keeping the country functioning.
I really hope that people can put their difference aside and find a way of doing that.
Sadly, there's a recent precedent in the same part of the world; explosives confiscated from a ship and stored badly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelos_Florakis_Naval_Base_explosion
Mad, looking at the Google maps of that area at least 8 big warehouses have vanished along with a big bit of the Dock
For those asking what on earth would you be doing with 240 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, its probably the most common fertilizer. Even in the UK an average arrable farm probably gets through 5-10t of of it in a year. 240t of it is potentially just a few containers worth.
Not something you would want to store in a built up area for retrospectively obvious reasons but were talking about those big white sacks you see left in the corner of the field on your local XC loop, often with a patch of smouldering grass under them as a bit leaks out. Not something that typically gets an armed guard or particulalry special treatment.
the daily fail reported the fire was started by a welder.
For those asking what on earth would you be doing with 240 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, its probably the most common fertilizer.
Which makes it odd that it was kept in storage for 6 years and not used as a fertilizer.
what on earth would you be doing with 240 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate
Prime Minister Hassan Diab said that about 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive material, had been stored at a port warehouse for the past six years "without preventive measures."
the daily fail reported the fire was started by a welder.
Probably an immigrant welder at that.
Welding or 'hot work' is a major cause of industrial accidents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster#Fire_and_explosions
Ship was impounded and abandoned by owners.
Cargo was stored next to a warehouse that stored fireworks.
Welder ignited fireworks >>> fireworks ignited ammonium nitrate
This is that Pepcon explosion
Prime Minister Hassan Diab said that about 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive material, had been stored at a port warehouse for the past six years “without preventive measures.”
Sorry, I misquoted. Still doesn't seem like an abnormal amount when you consider the volumes of the stuff being shopped around the world on bulk transport ships.
Ship was impounded and abandoned by owners.>
From that:
Owing to the risks associated with retaining the Ammonium Nitrate on
board the vessel, the port authorities discharged the cargo onto the
port’s warehouses.
And left it there for four years. Next to the firework warehouse.
Did some Wikipedia reading on ammonium nitrate explosions, found my new favourite industrial accident. Workers used sticks of dynamite to loosen fertilizer that was packed in a silo, and loosen it they certainly did:
Odd they'd store it for so long, as said - surely it would be easier to flog it off to local agriculture, even if in smaller batches, make a bit of cash, free up some warehouse space and, a smaller amount of volatile stuff sat around... very odd.
mmm... but Lebanon's administration hasn't been the most... functional for the last few years, so it's no huge surprise it's just been sat there trapped in bureaucracy if nothing else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster
Not the first by any means. History easily forgets America’s worst industrial accident. You might like to note where the ship’s propeller ended up.
I couldn't believe the explosion being heard 150 miles away. Using the mile every 5s we used to consider as kids to work out how far the lightning was away, that's 12.5 mins before the bang.
That means if you could have seen the explosion at that distance, you'd have had time to run an extra mile and a half away from it (at 8 mins/mile which I reckon I could manage if running away from an explosion of that size, plus half a minute of WTF was that!)
History easily forgets America’s worst industrial accident. You might like to note where the ship’s propeller ended up.
Every time I do my fire training, there is a video from the states that is so ridiculous, it would be hard to make up.
Cargo was stored next to a warehouse that stored fireworks.
Welder ignited fireworks >>> fireworks ignited ammonium nitrate
There’s video from an apartment showing the initial fire, from nearer the actual port, and there are continual bright flashes in the smoke from fireworks going off, just before the AN went up, and there’s more video from a vessel further out from the port, and it shows the shockwave going up, then the column of smoke, looks just like the nuke tests at White Sands. I’ll see if I can find the article on boingboing.
Here it is, it compiles a number of videos shot by locals, along with the footage from the ship.
https://boingboing.net/2020/08/04/massive-explosion-rocks-beirut.html
I have been moved to donate some cash for the people of Beirut, i have donated to the red cross as they appear on the ground.
There may or may not be better charities to donate but wanted to do something as small as it may be.
https://donate.redcross.org.uk/appeal/beirut-emergency-appeal
For those asking what on earth would you be doing with 240 tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate, its probably the most common fertilizer..
2700 ish tons, which is a tnt equiv of 250 ish tons. It degrades over time and becomes less stable too.
I couldn’t believe the explosion being heard 150 miles away
My gran told me that she could hear the fighting from the Somme at home in Surrey when she was little.
I couldn’t believe the explosion being heard 150 miles away
Mount St Helen's in 1980 was heard at about 200 miles. Krakatoa was 10 times that!
That amount of ammonium nitrate going up though, at rough chemistry calculations, is about 12 million cubic metres of gas produced in a fraction of a second. Just over a kiloton equivalent of TNT which is about 1/12th Hiroshima.
****ing big - bigger than any normal bomb short of a tactical nuclear weapon.
Every time I do my fire training, there is a video from the states that is so ridiculous, it would be hard to make up.
Trump defunded the CSB, so there wont be anymore of those videos unfortunately, they were great when you got stuck for a H&S example to talk about.
Aye, CSB videos were awesome, let's weld on top of this grain silo! My personal favourite was the petrol tanker driver who used gas burning gear to see inside his inspection hatch, see if there's any gasoline still in there... 😁
By jings, the lightning speed and accuracy of forensics explaining that destruction. I never cease to be amazed.
I watched the BBC4 program on Hirishoma last night. The scenes of devastation are very similar.
☹️
Part of my year out at university was with a major oil company. One of the things I helped on was explosion propagation on oil rigs. Counter-intuitively the more fixtures on a rig the quicker the propagation and the effects were stronger further away from the source. In short the constrictions between fixtures forced the energy through the gaps.
The same will have happened in the streets of Beirut with the buildings concentrating the energy and extending the range of damage.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-53680772
With a bit of time to collate all the photos and info, this article has some before/after shots and a bit more detail.
Some background history of the ship and it’s cargo. The whole ‘flag of convenience’ thing just encourages corrupt practices, and Moldova is the worst of the lot.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/beirut-explosion-ship-boat
True, but that doesn't absolve the Lebanese authorities of responsibility for the seized cargo.
Yup, the ship isn’t the problem. Sitting with your finger up your bum for 6 years doing nothing about the bomb in your warehouse is the problem
It feels like one of those things where nobody thought it'd be there for 6 years. Stick it in that warehouse for a week or two til the problem's sorted, won't take long.