Massive Beirut, Lebanon explosion

The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Visualizing The Biggest Ammonium Nitrate Explosions Since 2000
7 Aug 2020

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/biggest-ammonium-nitrate-explosions-2000
ammonium-nitrate-explosions-2.png


accidental-explosions.png
 
Note the very fast arrival of the ground shock before the air blast, the former going 2 to 5 times as fast as the latter depending upon geological characteristics. Looks like someone just put a camera on a balcony ledge and let it run while, hopefully, they left.

EDIT: Nope, in freeze frame as the camera tumbles I see a guy in shorts. The 2.2 second delay from detonation to blast arrival indicates he's around 760 meters from ground zero. At 1.2 kilotons yield there'd be a 2 psi overpressure at that distance. At 3 kilotons yield, 4 psi.

 
Last edited:
My understanding is that several of the videos we've seen are from cell phones taken from fatalities.
It doesn't take much overpressure to kill... less than 5 PSI.
As I said, teaching point

You see badness, run the other way or take cover. Don’t dig out the phone and start videoing.

I don’t want my epitaph to read

Died but got 10,000,000 YouTube hits!
 
That there is an OMG moment. Presumably they survived to tell the tale and publish the video. I wonder if they have functional eardrums at this point. Probably got blast TBI. Lucky the building didn't collapse.
As far as I am concerned, while the deaths are tragic, those resulting from hanging around to video it suffered from PBBI, PreBlast Brain Injury. Situational awareness we should share with out kids.

Sort of like the traffic jams caused by highway gawkers that have to slow down and look at an accident that has actually already been moved OFF the road. Don’t slow down and hang around and look at it, get clear and past it ASAP.
 
Ya know, it's perfectly safe to store hobby rocket motors under the bed, until it isn't. Storing that much AN for so long in limbo should be criminal. Still, I blame the fireworks.
 
Sort of like the traffic jams caused by highway gawkers that have to slow down and look at an accident that has actually already been moved OFF the road. Don’t slow down and hang around and look at it,
Off topic reply here, but I wanted to address this because it's a HUGE pet peeve of mine. When I'm in traffic and finally get to the point where I'm driving by the cause of the jam, a wreck on the side of the road or whatever, I always ignore it (I've seen them before) and stay as close to the car in front of me as I safely can. When it picks up speed so do I. Once I'm clear I look back at the car behind me in which the driver has nearly always been rubber necking and they'll be way behind me. I'm hoping that when they look up and see how much space is in front of them they realize that people doing what they just did are the reason traffic gets heavy, and maybe they won't look next time.

If my teenage son is in the car I tell him to get a good look at the wreck, traffic stop, or whatever it is, while he's not driving. He knows to get it out of his system now and avoid rubber necking as a driver later.
 
As I said, teaching point

You see badness, run the other way or take cover. Don’t dig out the phone and start videoing.

I don’t want my epitaph to read

Died but got 10,000,000 YouTube hits!

True enough. But, to be fair, quite a few of those folks were far enough away, that none of us would have ever expected to be in danger. Why would I run away from a warehouse fire that was already a mile or two away?
 
Off topic reply here, but I wanted to address this because it's a HUGE pet peeve of mine. When I'm in traffic and finally get to the point where I'm driving by the cause of the jam, a wreck on the side of the road or whatever, I always ignore it (I've seen them before) and stay as close to the car in front of me as I safely can. ....

I couldn't tell you how many times I have ended up responding to worse injuries from accidents caused by rubbernecking or have seen near misses (and accidents too) caused by people staring at us orbiting overhead while spotting the LZ.
 
True enough. But, to be fair, quite a few of those folks were far enough away, that none of us would have ever expected to be in danger. Why would I run away from a warehouse fire that was already a mile or two away?
That was my reaction as well. No one (unless they were aware that millions of pounds of ammonium nitrate were stockpiled next door) would have thought they were in any danger when filming from all the clips I've seen. Each was taken from a very significant standoff distance.
 
True enough. But, to be fair, quite a few of those folks were far enough away, that none of us would have ever expected to be in danger. Why would I run away from a warehouse fire that was already a mile or two away?
Now you know why! Explosions and other disasters don’t care a rat’s patootie about being fair. Kind of like Covid, stay as far away from it and spend as little time close to it as possible,

Run away! Run away!
 
The low end of detonation pressure waves is at 1400 m/s. That's just under 1 mile/second. If I was sitting there 1/2 mile away watching that fire and not knowing it had nearly 3000 tons of explosives, I would record too...and then probably be very seriously injured or dead a 1/2 second later because you can't take shelter in 1/2 a second. Hind-sight being 20/20, we all say don't record and get away but I bet the vast majority of us would record if we thought we were at a safe distance.
 
Off topic reply here, but I wanted to address this because it's a HUGE pet peeve of mine. When I'm in traffic and finally get to the point where I'm driving by the cause of the jam, a wreck on the side of the road or whatever, I always ignore it (I've seen them before) and stay as close to the car in front of me as I safely can. When it picks up speed so do I. Once I'm clear I look back at the car behind me in which the driver has nearly always been rubber necking and they'll be way behind me. I'm hoping that when they look up and see how much space is in front of them they realize that people doing what they just did are the reason traffic gets heavy, and maybe they won't look next time.

If my teenage son is in the car I tell him to get a good look at the wreck, traffic stop, or whatever it is, while he's not driving. He knows to get it out of his system now and avoid rubber necking as a driver later.
I’m with you man. Most frustrating was somewhere out in the middle of nowhere divided highway with a wreck blocking both SOUTHBOUND lanes (I was going NORTH.) And by “divided” I mean something like 30 yards of median between Northbound and Southbound lanes. I underSTOOD why the southbound traffic was backed up for miles, but because of the gawkers going Northbound WE were backed up and delayed for an hour. You gotta wonder how many man- and woman-hours, millions of gallons of gas, and tons of pollution are wasted just because SOMEBODY decided they HAD to slow down and check out a wreck or a drug bust or some other thing that has NOTHING to do with flow of traffic in THEIR lane.

I try to pray for these people, but all I can think about sometimes is the Rabbi’s blessing for the Czar in Fiddler on the Roof. When asked, “Rabbi, is there a blessing for the Czar?” he replied

“A blessing for the Czar?......

Of course, my son.

May God bless and keep the Czar..........far away from us!”
 

The slow mo of the destruction is amazing. You can see what the pressure wave does coming out the back of the buildings (the side away from the blast.) That was brutal.

Here's a video that shows the ground shock shaking the building like an earthquake a few seconds before the pressure wave slams into it.


Edited: Oops, I see that Winston already posted this in #42. I missed that the first time through.
 
Last edited:
Dangerous Chemical Containers Still Leaking At Destroyed Beirut Port; Initial Cause Of Fire Revealed
11 Aug 2020

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopoliti...king-destroyed-beirut-port-initial-cause-fire
More has been learned and confirmed about what precisely started the deadly fire which detonated the highly explosive and volatile ammonium nitrate, commonly used in fertilizer and professional explosives.

Lebanese media as well as Reuters has widely reported the fire started after welding work was done in the very warehouse containing the volatile chemical compound.

It appears the welding crew had no idea that both ammonium nitrate and (astoundingly) a cache of fireworks were being stored on site.
 
Could a World War II Shipwreck Cause the Next Beirut-Like Explosion?
The SS Richard Montgomery is basically a bomb waiting to go off.
7 Aug 2020

https://www.popularmechanics.com/mi...ard-montgomery-shipwreck-potential-explosion/
An American cargo ship that accidentally sank off the coast of London during World War II could cause a major explosion rivaling that of the devastating blast in Beirut earlier this week.

In August 1944, the SS Richard Montgomery, a ship ferrying supplies back and forth to Europe after the D-Day invasion, sank at the mouth of the Thames River on the sea approach to London. Authorities are prepared to cut the ship’s mast to make the ship safer, but even that might cause the ship to explode—with devastating consequences.

Before she sank, the Richard Montgomery was awaiting a convoy heading to France and had taken up position at the mouth of the Thames River. She was loaded with 6,000 tons of supplies and munitions waiting for the U.S. Army in France when she suddenly ran aground. Stevedores managed to get 4,500 tons of equipment off the ship before she snapped in two and sank, but another 1,500 tons remained. [a mixture of high explosive and fragmentation bombs according to the Forbes article - W].

The ship has sat virtually untouched for the last 76 years. Although it's considered stable, authorities warn that attempts to interfere with it could cause it to explode. The remaining 1,500 tons of munitions could cause an explosion even bigger than the one in Beirut.

While the Richard Montgomery is more than a mile from shore, Forbes warns an explosion would cause a mini-tsunami between 4 and 16 feet high, shatter windows for miles, and have a devastating effect on passing ships.

Authorities in the past have said the wreck is relatively stable, but a recent survey points to a new danger. They now believe the ship’s mast, sticking out from above the water line, is straining the wreck and could cause it to explode. Plus, attempts to shorten the mast to relieve some of the strain could cause the ship to explode.


Work On Decaying Bomb-Filled Shipwreck In U.K. ‘Carries Risk’ Of Catastrophic Explosion

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidh...b-filled-shipwreck-carries-risk/#aed6298653c6
When the issue was raised in Parliament last year, the government view expressed by Baroness Barran was that it was difficult to assess the possible effects of an explosion and “the cargo is likely to be stable if left undisturbed.” She also said that “we believe that the TNT is likely to be inert because the fuses have degraded over time” which suggests a lack of understanding – even if the fuses no longer operate, the TNT itself is far from inert and will explode if detonated. [which suggests a lack of understanding by the author as the fuses are what detonate the TNT and are the most sensitive parts; that said, it's not safe to just assume that they have all degraded to the point where they won't detonate if disturbed; EOD personnel dealing with WWII UXB aerial bombs don't assume that; in any case, just as with the Beirut AN cache, this should have been dealt with LONG ago. - W]

general-view-of-the-wreck-of-the-ss-richard-montgomery-a-news-photo-1596741645.jpg


960x0.jpg
 
Back
Top