Almost looked like a fuel air explosion but hard to say camera pulled back too soon. Certainly lots of explosive employed. Inside job?
Strangely enough, Iran seems to also be experiencing a number of strange and unusual explosions in the country. It may be spreading to their proxies in Lebanon.
At first, I suspected the grain bins had blown, but the Lebanese government is pointing fingers at the port authority. Apparently some an ammonium nitrate shipment was confiscated and then stored near a fireworks storage facility.
One of the vids on Zerohedge from a boat well off-shore showed the explosion and the shockwave rippling across the bay towards the boat at nearly the blink of an eye.
There was damage at the airport, six miles away. Initial reports say it was a container of fireworks. B***shit. That was some professional ordnance.
Revised comment. What looks like an entire one-story warehouse went up. Must have been a large stock of explosive material a part of which ignited and set off the rest. Either by spark or it reached heat of ignition due to the fireworks fire. Prior to the big bake-off you can see reports going off at the base of the prior fire. The hi rise concrete and steel structure was not the source of the blast but received the brunt of it and went down quickly. Probably want to keep your fireworks factories and fertilizer warehouses separated. Here is a better angle, note the expanding hemisphere from the warehouse:
Guy was lucky his balcony door was open, probably saved him getting a high-velocity glass shower.
The huge red cloud might be NO2.
Suspect reddish brown material to be non-flammable dust from what used to be the walls of the warehouse and maybe dirt kicked up from underneath it. Lighter colored smoke from the collapsed hi rise.
Hard to say, the longest videos I saw only goes about half a minute past the detonation. I don’t see any of that dust separating from the cloud for what it’s worth.
The expanding opaque area is interesting – I think it’s a supersonic shockwave. You can see it for almost two seconds, and then it disappears (from ground up, it appears to me), perhaps it transitioned to subsonic at that point? I guess that probably means a 1-2 kilometer diameter circular region around the point of detonation was exposed to that shockwave.
Also, just realized that the initial white cloud prior to the explosion isn’t very big meaning it probably wasn’t burning for longer than half a minute or so before the big boom. Whatever happened, probably happened pretty fast.
The BBC reported two explosions. This makes sense to me as a possibility. The fireworks goes off first, then a short while later the ammonium nitrate or whatever goes off. That may mean that firefighters might not have been caught in the explosion since they might not have had time to respond.
BBC video report here has a well delineated reddish smoke cloud at first, but in later shots of the area the sky has turned a hazy red which could be reddish dust separating.
AP is reporting that confiscated Sodium Nitrate was stored there. Wikipedia:
“Sodium nitrate is a white solid very soluble in water. It is a readily available source of the nitrate anion (NO3−), which is useful in several reactions carried out on industrial scales for the production of fertilizers, pyrotechnics and smoke bombs, glass and pottery enamels, food preservatives (esp. meats), and solid rocket propellant”
I’ve always thought Pottery Barns ought to be outside populated areas….
AP is reporting that confiscated Sodium Nitrate was stored there.
— Not Anymore: Clouseau
Sodium nitrate decomposes, but not explosively.
More likely ammonium nitrate. It will definitely perform like that.
They could have that much of it on hand because it’s much cheaper than the ammonium dayrate.
The secretary-general of the Phalangist party was killed, which sounds suspicious at first, but his office was close to the explosion site and probably facing the water.
That would be a bit suspicious since the location you show is in the shadow of the grain terminal and a half mile away. Of course it could have been a heart attack, that was a really big bang.
Actually you can see a “shadow” in the video above (a rectangular patch that is on the upper part of the hemispherical shockwave. The catch is that it is going up rather than staying on the ground. Shockwaves can wrap around obstacles too. And for this explosion, half a mile away is too close.
CNN headquarters in Beirut was about a kilometer ( 0.62 miles) away, and was pretty much destroyed.
At least something good came out of it.
Orange Cloud Bad?
And nothing of value was lost…
Well the good news here, there is a distinct possibility, like oil well hellfighters, that the 2nd explosion took enough oxygen out of the air to completely suppress the fireworks fire. Explosive decompression is however NOT the first method recommended in the firefighters manual. Another thought about that red cloud. Could have been a lot of the clay used in fireworks molds and for shaping fireworks.
Also agree, the very warm humid air going opaque shows up the supersonic shockwave very nicely. Surely there will be injuries and probable loss of life. Not a well thought out situation and that is what is most regrettable.
Also agree, the very warm humid air going opaque shows up the supersonic shockwave very nicely.
For what it’s worth, I think the opaque layer actually trails the shockwave by a little bit. There’s one way-too-close video where you can see the shockwave approach the camera up a street and start taking pieces off a small building’s roof before the opaque part gets there.
You can actually see it hit the sides of building and climb up them. That video, parallel to the grain silo, provides the best information until the photographer decides to duck for cover, which is understandable.
Some in the Lebanese government is now wanting to know how in heck someone got permission to store, for six years, 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the warehouse that blew up. There are photos of it in the warehouse.
2750 tons of AN was taken off a ship that limped into the port in 2013:
Before the roughly 1 kT explosion, a continuous roar of smaller munitions was cooking off, making brief white explosions seen on several videos. I suspect that those were military ordnance also stored in the same warehouse. Eventually, the fire and smaller explosions set off the AN, which detonated without much fuel mixed in with it, producing a lot of NO2 which made the red cloud.
Some of the videos have a rumble just before the air blast, low-frequency sound coupled into the air from the seismic wave passing through the ground much faster than the airwave.
It may be that the whole disaster was caused by storing AN and other explosives at the same site, and a small fire became a larger one, multiple small explosions. a medium one, and then the huge one. The ordinary folks pay the highest price for their government not moving the hazardous materials to a more isolated location.
Another interesting link to wikipedia (only to be trusted in non-political areas, of course). I knew of about three previous AN disasters, but the full list is sobering.
This past year I listened to “The Alchemy of Air“, the story of Haber Bosch and their process for making ammonia, by Thomas Hager. Among other things, it covers the 1921 Oppau disaster in detail. The inventors and BASF played an outsize role in making the modern world, and their story is fascinating. For example, Bosch was an ardent anti-Nazi yet his brainchild and his company supplied the fuel and ammunition for Germany’s war machine, after having extended WW-I by probably a year, maybe two. I highly recommend it.
It has lots of charts, graphs, and tables. From the summary:
One important result of the investigation was the demonstration of a marked reduction in the critical diameter for detonation of raw AN at elevated temperatures. Typical fertilizer-grade AN at ordinary temperatures will have a critical diameter in the range of 10 to perhaps 40 inches. In contrast the same AN, when heated to near its melting point, may have a critical diameter in the order of only 4 to 5 inches under light confinement and as small as 2 inches under heavy confinement. Similarly, contamination with fuel substances, particularly finely divided solid fuels or liquid fuels, effects a reduction in the critical diameter as well as producing more energetic systems. Another result was the confirmation of reports from Canada that a small amount of water would increase the shock sensitivity of AN-FO. Although these data were obtained using explosive-derived shocks, they are significant to the fire problems because of the possibility of fragments being projected into the hot AN by adjacent explosions resulting from the fire. A smaller critical diameter means that a smaller fragment or one traveling at a lower velocity may be capable of initiating the AN; this possibility is enhanced by multiple fragments. This fact was confirmed by the results on projectile initiation of AN at elevated temperatures.
Ammonium nitrate was also responsible for the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, a Soviet nuclear disaster that contaminated 20,000 square miles of territory. The Mayak plant in Kyshtym was used for recovering plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The process involved dissolving the fuel in nitric acid, then adding acetic acid and a base to neutralize the product. The uranium and plutonium would form acetate salts, which could be precipitated out. Another product was ammonium nitrate. Typical of Soviet incompetence, they let the cooling system for one of the storage tank areas go unattended. It failed, and when things got hot enough, the AN detonated and sent about 20 million Curies of spent reactor fuel airborne.
The crater is too round and symmetrical for a warehouse full of bags of fertilizer going up. That looks more like a single point explosion to me. And the smaller flashes before the big one didn’t fly out of the building. I would have expected fireworks to have at least some lateral or vertical movement during cook-off. I don’t know what it was, but I think the official version is mostly baloney.
Almost regardless of the shape of the storage area, the blast wave in a uniformly packed warehouse is going to propagate spherically outwards from the initial detonation point.
Shorter version: There’s no way to make a square “boom” with a single block of explosives and one detonator.
The biggest explosion wasn’t the AN. That explosion was big, sure, but the biggest explosion was the grain dust that the AN explosion threw into the air when it took out the side of that grain elevator.
Grain dust has a very high surface area to volume ratio. Throw it into the air and provide an ignition source, kerboom. It reminds me of the Mythbusters episode where they used an air cannon to throw a ton of non-dairy creamer in the air before ignition. That was the second-biggest explosion on the show. And that was only a ton, not thousands of tons.
Almost looked like a fuel air explosion but hard to say camera pulled back too soon. Certainly lots of explosive employed. Inside job?
Strangely enough, Iran seems to also be experiencing a number of strange and unusual explosions in the country. It may be spreading to their proxies in Lebanon.
At first, I suspected the grain bins had blown, but the Lebanese government is pointing fingers at the port authority. Apparently some an ammonium nitrate shipment was confiscated and then stored near a fireworks storage facility.
One of the vids on Zerohedge from a boat well off-shore showed the explosion and the shockwave rippling across the bay towards the boat at nearly the blink of an eye.
There was damage at the airport, six miles away. Initial reports say it was a container of fireworks. B***shit. That was some professional ordnance.
Revised comment. What looks like an entire one-story warehouse went up. Must have been a large stock of explosive material a part of which ignited and set off the rest. Either by spark or it reached heat of ignition due to the fireworks fire. Prior to the big bake-off you can see reports going off at the base of the prior fire. The hi rise concrete and steel structure was not the source of the blast but received the brunt of it and went down quickly. Probably want to keep your fireworks factories and fertilizer warehouses separated. Here is a better angle, note the expanding hemisphere from the warehouse:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1290675854767513600
Guy was lucky his balcony door was open, probably saved him getting a high-velocity glass shower.
The huge red cloud might be NO2.
Suspect reddish brown material to be non-flammable dust from what used to be the walls of the warehouse and maybe dirt kicked up from underneath it. Lighter colored smoke from the collapsed hi rise.
Hard to say, the longest videos I saw only goes about half a minute past the detonation. I don’t see any of that dust separating from the cloud for what it’s worth.
The expanding opaque area is interesting – I think it’s a supersonic shockwave. You can see it for almost two seconds, and then it disappears (from ground up, it appears to me), perhaps it transitioned to subsonic at that point? I guess that probably means a 1-2 kilometer diameter circular region around the point of detonation was exposed to that shockwave.
Also, just realized that the initial white cloud prior to the explosion isn’t very big meaning it probably wasn’t burning for longer than half a minute or so before the big boom. Whatever happened, probably happened pretty fast.
The BBC reported two explosions. This makes sense to me as a possibility. The fireworks goes off first, then a short while later the ammonium nitrate or whatever goes off. That may mean that firefighters might not have been caught in the explosion since they might not have had time to respond.
BBC video report here has a well delineated reddish smoke cloud at first, but in later shots of the area the sky has turned a hazy red which could be reddish dust separating.
AP is reporting that confiscated Sodium Nitrate was stored there. Wikipedia:
“Sodium nitrate is a white solid very soluble in water. It is a readily available source of the nitrate anion (NO3−), which is useful in several reactions carried out on industrial scales for the production of fertilizers, pyrotechnics and smoke bombs, glass and pottery enamels, food preservatives (esp. meats), and solid rocket propellant”
I’ve always thought Pottery Barns ought to be outside populated areas….
AP is reporting that confiscated Sodium Nitrate was stored there.
— Not Anymore: Clouseau
Sodium nitrate decomposes, but not explosively.
More likely ammonium nitrate. It will definitely perform like that.
They could have that much of it on hand because it’s much cheaper than the ammonium dayrate.
The secretary-general of the Phalangist party was killed, which sounds suspicious at first, but his office was close to the explosion site and probably facing the water.
https://tinyurl.com/yyxsg4jc
@FC
That would be a bit suspicious since the location you show is in the shadow of the grain terminal and a half mile away. Of course it could have been a heart attack, that was a really big bang.
Actually you can see a “shadow” in the video above (a rectangular patch that is on the upper part of the hemispherical shockwave. The catch is that it is going up rather than staying on the ground. Shockwaves can wrap around obstacles too. And for this explosion, half a mile away is too close.
CNN headquarters in Beirut was about a kilometer ( 0.62 miles) away, and was pretty much destroyed.
At least something good came out of it.
Orange Cloud Bad?
And nothing of value was lost…
Well the good news here, there is a distinct possibility, like oil well hellfighters, that the 2nd explosion took enough oxygen out of the air to completely suppress the fireworks fire. Explosive decompression is however NOT the first method recommended in the firefighters manual. Another thought about that red cloud. Could have been a lot of the clay used in fireworks molds and for shaping fireworks.
Also agree, the very warm humid air going opaque shows up the supersonic shockwave very nicely. Surely there will be injuries and probable loss of life. Not a well thought out situation and that is what is most regrettable.
Also agree, the very warm humid air going opaque shows up the supersonic shockwave very nicely.
For what it’s worth, I think the opaque layer actually trails the shockwave by a little bit. There’s one way-too-close video where you can see the shockwave approach the camera up a street and start taking pieces off a small building’s roof before the opaque part gets there.
You can actually see it hit the sides of building and climb up them. That video, parallel to the grain silo, provides the best information until the photographer decides to duck for cover, which is understandable.
Some in the Lebanese government is now wanting to know how in heck someone got permission to store, for six years, 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the warehouse that blew up. There are photos of it in the warehouse.
2750 tons of AN was taken off a ship that limped into the port in 2013:
http://shiparrested.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/The-Arrest-News-11th-issue.pdf
Before the roughly 1 kT explosion, a continuous roar of smaller munitions was cooking off, making brief white explosions seen on several videos. I suspect that those were military ordnance also stored in the same warehouse. Eventually, the fire and smaller explosions set off the AN, which detonated without much fuel mixed in with it, producing a lot of NO2 which made the red cloud.
Some of the videos have a rumble just before the air blast, low-frequency sound coupled into the air from the seismic wave passing through the ground much faster than the airwave.
It may be that the whole disaster was caused by storing AN and other explosives at the same site, and a small fire became a larger one, multiple small explosions. a medium one, and then the huge one. The ordinary folks pay the highest price for their government not moving the hazardous materials to a more isolated location.
Another interesting link to wikipedia (only to be trusted in non-political areas, of course). I knew of about three previous AN disasters, but the full list is sobering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
This past year I listened to “The Alchemy of Air“, the story of Haber Bosch and their process for making ammonia, by Thomas Hager. Among other things, it covers the 1921 Oppau disaster in detail. The inventors and BASF played an outsize role in making the modern world, and their story is fascinating. For example, Bosch was an ardent anti-Nazi yet his brainchild and his company supplied the fuel and ammunition for Germany’s war machine, after having extended WW-I by probably a year, maybe two. I highly recommend it.
For reference:
Explosion Hazards of Ammonium Nitrate Under Fire Exposure
US Dept of the Interior, Bureau of Mines, 1966.
It has lots of charts, graphs, and tables. From the summary:
And the complementary: https://miningandblasting.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/safety-of-ammonium-nitrate.pdf
Ammonium nitrate was also responsible for the 1957 Kyshtym disaster, a Soviet nuclear disaster that contaminated 20,000 square miles of territory. The Mayak plant in Kyshtym was used for recovering plutonium from spent reactor fuel. The process involved dissolving the fuel in nitric acid, then adding acetic acid and a base to neutralize the product. The uranium and plutonium would form acetate salts, which could be precipitated out. Another product was ammonium nitrate. Typical of Soviet incompetence, they let the cooling system for one of the storage tank areas go unattended. It failed, and when things got hot enough, the AN detonated and sent about 20 million Curies of spent reactor fuel airborne.
The crater is too round and symmetrical for a warehouse full of bags of fertilizer going up. That looks more like a single point explosion to me. And the smaller flashes before the big one didn’t fly out of the building. I would have expected fireworks to have at least some lateral or vertical movement during cook-off. I don’t know what it was, but I think the official version is mostly baloney.
Almost regardless of the shape of the storage area, the blast wave in a uniformly packed warehouse is going to propagate spherically outwards from the initial detonation point.
Shorter version: There’s no way to make a square “boom” with a single block of explosives and one detonator.
The biggest explosion wasn’t the AN. That explosion was big, sure, but the biggest explosion was the grain dust that the AN explosion threw into the air when it took out the side of that grain elevator.
Grain dust has a very high surface area to volume ratio. Throw it into the air and provide an ignition source, kerboom. It reminds me of the Mythbusters episode where they used an air cannon to throw a ton of non-dairy creamer in the air before ignition. That was the second-biggest explosion on the show. And that was only a ton, not thousands of tons.