Beruit Explosion

Here is a video of the explosion that took place recently in Beruit, Lebannon.

To put the explosion into perspective, Timothy McVeigh used 2.4(4,800 pounds) of ammonium nitrate, the same chemicals that caused the warehouse to explode.

The difference is the amount used. McVeigh used 2.4 tons while 7,800 tons (15,600 pounds) exploded at the warehouse.

I was reading about ammonium nitrate (AN) and there are three ways to ignite it.

  1. Fire
  2. Oils
  3. Detonator

It will be interesting to see which catalyst caused the fertilizer to explode and why precautions were not taken to avoid the mixing of reactants.

Fire would most likely be cause, maybe from faulty wiring.

Oils, why would anyone store oils in the same warehouse with AN knowing if they mixed they would result in and explosion? Why didn’t the warehouse manager know that oils and AN do not mix and not to store them together?

A detonator would link the explosion to terrorism. Matter of fact all three of the catalysts could be linked to terrorists purposely causing the explosion.

Don’t rush to attribute to malice what can be readily explained by incompetence.

There are photos of how this stuff was stored. An explosion was basically inevitable.

If you store sawdust in the the conditions and method they were storing this stuff in, that would explode, too.

Edit: I can’t spell.

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To put that in perspective, that’s enough AN to cover roughly half of a regulation soccer/football pitch in a layer 1 meter thick.

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That is a lot of AN.

And we use ammonium nitrate in fertilizer, not wonder people walking around suddenly explode or combust into flames for no reason at all.

“Hey Bob, how have things…”
Bob takes out a smoke and lights it using the flames coming from Dave’s body
“A lot better then your day is going, that much is for certain.”
“Funny Bob, very funny.”
“Glass of water Dave?”

Here’s a MOAB video, for scale:

That’s only 11 tons of explosives. Now, it’s weaponized explosives, so the thing was engineered to be as destructive as possible, but still, 11 tons versus 7,800 (if those figures are true, and they might be, since that much would fit on a tanker).

The Beirut explosion had a stronger yield than the biggest one from the PEPCON disaster:

Although the explosive there was ammonium perchlorate, and I’m not sure which is stronger.

Perchloridric acid is stronger, but that is not acid, it’s explosive, because of the mixture.
TNT is explosive.

The figure I saw for the amount of AN in Beirut was 2,750 tons, not the figure you quote. Where did your figure come from ?

First, the city it’s called Beirut, not Beruit. :slightly_smiling_face:

Second, there was 2,750 metric tons of Ammonia Nitrate (AN), not 7,800, seized for unclear reasons from a Russian ship in 2014

Third, once AN reaches its boling point = flash point = 210Âş C, it will start decomposing into NO and H2O very fast and in a exothermic reaction which will develop into a AN fire unless AN is either too polluted with other substances or too spread out as to keep itself above the flash point.

Fourth, when mixed with a fuel and compressed by a trigger shockwave, AN will explode fast enough to sustain its own shockave -that’s the principle behind ANFO, Ammonal and other AN enriched explosives

Fifth, AN can generate a shockwave of its own when it ignites and it’s confined and/or densely packed; apparently the stored matherial at Beirut was so decayed after being moist and heated for years that it had become a dense rock-like substance instead of the original fluffy pellets

Sixth, we know AN was the culprit because of the tell-tale red NOx smokes from partially ignited AN, present at the smoke plume from the explosion

Seventh, the estimated yield of the explosion was about 1 kiloton, based on the damages. That’s a sensible guess given that a lot of the stored AN would ignite without exploding and then the shockwave blew the building, just scathering unexploded AN as it burned.

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That is a pretty savage experience to go through, imagine walking down the road about a mile away from that and witnessing the blast wave smash through you…

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10,000 tons of explosive
at 1 minute 45 seconds.

Not of Ammonium Nitrate, not of ammonium perchlorate,
but of Ammonium Nitrate.

Huh… wrong video?

Why?
It shows it’s 10,000 tons, not 2,500 tons.
It’s around 4 times more.

Ah, I get it now, the bomb had 11 tons.
It was not Ammonium Nitrate or Perchlorate.

Well, they used 10,000 tons , not 11 tons.
Also, 7,800 lbs or Kg, is not 7,800 tons, but 7.8 tons.

Also, if you measure nuclear weapons in tons of TNT, the TNT simply won’t do anything because it’s not TNT.

But they don’t show the explosion, maybe they didn’t used them all at once. This is the largest ground moving blast ever:

2,100 tons of explosive were spent in a single blast on October 2nd 1991.

They used TNT to dig a Calcium mine near my place, I know they don’t use it all at once.
The hole is about the same size as a ship though.

It can fit over 50 trucks to 100 trucks inside and there were roads to move the calcium ore back out.


This is a newer smaller one.

I read they closed the previous one.

Those are probably limestone, with 50% calcium.
The new one is probably (or, possibly) for cement.

I’m searching for old info, all of which is removed from public searches, and, the last one I did from which I found info is not there at this time yet.
I did save info on it, and quite frankly , at this point, I am also building database to track the info which is being removed because, they also seek to forfeit my information and the information that I pay to register copyright of, in some warfare and other goals they have.

The current Google map shows Russian language, with Google Map showing some procedure to revert back to English language, but , the procedure does not function, and, Google help info refers to Interface and commands which are not currently active.
I am taking screenshots , and could make videos , but, that is nothing new to me, that is why I will take an IT master to design my own hardware to avoid those with patents to hack my work in courts, and the courts trying to steal from me.

Right, the older mine is at least 10 to 50 times the size of the new image above.
You could fit 1 or 2 Titanic in it or more.

Production of refined products increased to 500 tons a day from 200 tons a day, back in the 1960s for $2 million in machinery on the manufacturing plant which is now closed, and , a new company is operating in their place, or, a place nearby.

–
1 hour later:
The program didn’t show street view, and I now finally managed to get the street view back again.

Yeah, the program is completely stalled now.
It shows some kind of calcium deposit on the road, but it seems to be the wrong road, and some kind of fine gravel road, instead of the original road.

There is goes again, Russian names instead of English.
Furthermore, the previous road now is a gravel road, and, Google Maps doesn’t cover it anymore.

Ah, there.
I finally got the Google Satellite view to work.

It seems to have been filled with water, and a lot has been changed, and most of the info is not publicly accessible from simple searches.

3.63 times more is 10,000 tons (or tonnes) divided by 2,750 tons.


It’s hard to tell and I couldn’t find the data I saved a few months ago from that, back again, yet.
It seems that the area is now filled with water or that there is something blocking the top.
There was also none of that grey structure(s) on the left before.

The mine was still opened.
It is also listed as a quarry.

(The system even uploaded the wrong image and I had to fix it after, so, it’s not only a Google limited communication problem).

They definitely spend a lot of money to hide as much as possible.
It’s very hard to find.

Many people were still missing the day after the Tuesday blast, and 300,000 have been displaced from their homes. The city’s emergency services, already under strain due to the Covid-19 pandemic, were operating at decreased capacity after four hospitals were damaged. The explosion’s shockwave damaged buildings up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.

A warehouse storing thousands of tons of an unsecured and volatile chemical compound has emerged as a possible source of the blast. It’s still not exactly clear what led to the ignition that wiped out entire streets, but questions swirled Wednesday over whether the authorities had failed to act on warning signs.

Prime Minister Hassan Diab said that 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate – typically used as an agricultural fertilizer – had been stored for six years at a warehouse in the Beirut port without safety measures, “endangering the safety of citizens,” according to a statement.

2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploding does not displace 300,000 people.

210 degrees Celsius equals 410 degree Fahrenheit. I’m certain the heat in the warehouse wasn’t that hot.

In this review data from the literature on thermal decomposition of ammonium nitrate (AN) and the effect of additives to their thermal decomposition are summarized. The effect of additives like oxides, cations, inorganic acids, organic compounds, phase-stablized CuO, etc., is discussed.

The effect of an additive mainly occurs at the exothermic peak of pure AN in a temperature range of 200°C to 140°C.

An additive was added to the AN in the warehouse to make it decompose and then explode. I’d say it was the Russians seeing as how the entire load was taken from a Russian ship for unknown reasons.

What is interesting is that packets of seeds from China have started to mysteriously appear in the U.S. for no reason. I wonder if there is a connection between the seed packets in the U.S. and the potential for Ammonium Nitrate to explode? I wonder if the the seed packets from China cause rapid thermal decomposition in fertilizers in the U.S. that have ammonium nitrate in them that are being used for indoor and outdoor plants that would then cause a possible explosion or fire to start in a home?

An explosion might not happen, but the possibility of releasing small particulates of poison gases into a home might happen as a result of the seed converting the fertilizer into energy that the seed needs to grow.

^That’s the best conspiracy theory I’ve heard yet! :wink:

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Do you have a photo of those seeds for no reason?
Are they male or female?

Here’s another video, it filmed the minutes before the explosion. At one point can be heard the sirens of firefighters going to the place, and also can be heard how fireworks explode for all the recording before a large explosion sends them off, and then about thirty seconds later comes the deadly boom. The explosion is played back slow down, with YT’s .25 speed can be seen in one frame a bright flash then the next frame is a willowing fireball then everything just goes boom. The shockwave hiting the buildings and turning their glass windows into dust is horribly haunting.

This is it people, this is the closest to an actual nuclear explosion we’ll ever see in our lives, God willing.