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Large explosion in Beirut
- kcmastrpc 6y agoUnconfirmed reports that a fireworks depot fire caused a secondary benzene explosion. src: https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1290679715892690945 https://twitter.com/mattparlmer/status/1290679715892690945
- madaxe_again 6y agoThat sounds plausible - it won’t be fireworks alone, black powder won’t make that kind of bang. Ammonium nitrate would fit the bill, too, which is the sort of thing you often have in warehouses or bulk carriers in quantities that would make an explosion of that order. Honestly, it’s somewhat amazing that this kind of thing doesn’t happen far more often than the ~1 incident per year, globally.
- Jtsummers 6y agoA friend of mine worked in EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) and related fields. I got to talk with him once about all this. One of the primary thing that reduces the rate of accidents is people following the rules. Basically, there are rules that say, based on mass, how far apart different things need to be from each other. It also varies by the kind of explosive (as different explosives have different triggers like heat or concussion). [0] is like the tables he showed me (his were more complex and dealt with specifically named explosives, not the broader categories this one describes). [0] https://www.atf.gov/explosives/table-distances https://www.atf.gov/explosives/table-distances
- reducesuffering 6y agoQuite prescient. Early reports from Lebanon's Interior Minister seemed to implicate ammonium nitrate.[0] [0]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/huge-explosion-rocks-lebanon-capital-beirut-live-updates-200804163620414.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/huge-explosion-rocks-...
- macintux 6y agoI’ve also seen reports of grain silos in the area being destroyed; grain is an astonishingly powerful explosive.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoGrain is a pretty poor explosive because the upper and lower explosive limits are so close (yes I know that's not traditionally a metric we use for solids), it needs an oxidier and the volume of byproduct for volume of input is relatively low. But large amounts of grain and oxygen are often found together in confined spaces so that makes it more explosive in practice than most things that people who work in offices and don't deal in bulk goods come into contact with.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoCan you elaborate what "upper and lower explosive limits" are, please. Also I don't understnd how it could be explosive at all, sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>upper and lower explosive limits concentration of the fuel in otherwise normal atmospheric air required to go whoosh (or bang, which is basically just a really fast woosh or one that's constrained by something). Too much fuel, too rich, no woosh. Too little fuel, too lean, no woosh. Lower and upper explosive limits are generally used to refer to gas mixtures though you can use them for solids but the units will be different. Solids we think of as explosive when not fishing around for virtue points on the internet generally contain their own oxygen supply so lower and upper explosive limit doesn't apply. >sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour? Yeah, no way that secondary explosion is flour or grain. I'd put my money on some sort of industrial chemical that contains its own oxidizer. Explosions that use atmospheric oxygen look different and rarely manage to be able to build up that kind of shock-wave if not constrained by something (like a building). There should be videos of natural gas explosions on YouTube that illustrate the difference.
- malandrew 6y agoI've seen one report that cites the Lebanese government that it was sodium nitrate seized from a ship that was temporarily stored there and was slated to be moved.
- albertkawmi 6y agoDoes anyone know what kind of explosion this might be?
- seibelj 6y agoOne article I read said it was near a place where fireworks were stored. But who knows for sure yet.
- gxqoz 6y agoExplosions of (literal) shit are apparently not uncommon in Beirut: https://thebaffler.com/latest/waste-away-mounzer?src=longreads&mc_cid=8c0cdfabcf&mc_eid=0731ac8d06 https://thebaffler.com/latest/waste-away-mounzer?src=longrea... "In November 2018, I was away from Beirut, briefly, for work. One morning I woke up to find a deluge of WhatsApp messages from various friends and relatives, all forwarding the same few videos. There had been a terrible storm. At one point, hail the size of fists had fallen. In one of the videos, shoppers run screaming as it smashes into the courtyard of a fancy mall. In another, a woman holds up a plastic chair on her balcony, so punched through with holes it looks like Swiss cheese. There are brutalized cars, felled trees and electricity poles, a man water-skiing on the northern coastal highway, mudslides in the quarries. The last was of the boulevard overlooking Ramlet el-Baida beach. The water was almost hip-deep, if the drowned cars parked on the side of the road were anything to measure by. But it wasn’t water: it was shit. Exploding so forcefully up from the depths that the sewer covers danced atop the flumes, like in a cartoon. Yes, Eden Bay, and all its enablers, had caused a literal shitstorm."
- bdz 6y agoAnother angle with huge mushroom cloud https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1290669902035132418 https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1290669902035132418
- evan_ 6y agoworth reminding everyone that mushroom clouds occur with large conventional explosions, not only nuclear explosions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_cloud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_cloud
- interestica 6y agoAnother angle of the explosion - https://twitter.com/FadyRoumieh/status/1290672517733064705 https://twitter.com/FadyRoumieh/status/1290672517733064705
- interestica 6y agoA user has compiled this synced compound video: https://twitter.com/AnalysisTwd/status/1290698045802373122 https://twitter.com/AnalysisTwd/status/1290698045802373122
- _Microft 6y agoLooks like this [0] is the place, judging by the angle from video [1] (take the building with the red cupola south of there and the building in the harbor as reference). [0] https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e851aed9-b5df-495a-89e8-5c53df3828fe&cp=33.902165~35.514249&lvl=16&style=a&v=2&sV=2&form=S00027 https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e851aed9-b5df-495a-89e8-5c53d... [1] https://twitter.com/JeonggukJeon__/status/1290689717227282434 https://twitter.com/JeonggukJeon__/status/129068971722728243...
- r721 6y agoYeah, Nick Waters from Bellingcat thinks the same: https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290681231693275136 https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290681231693275136 See also this tweet: https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290688278094647298 https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290688278094647298
- h2odragon 6y agoLooks like a fuel air explosion to me; perhaps the fireworks factory popped a large LNG tank, which flowed out until it hit an ignitable diffusion; which then blew the rest of the tank farm open and caused the next front.
- wintorez 6y agoWhat was that red material?
- detritus 6y agoThis is what I've been trying to work out, but am having problems Googling for suggestions. The only things I've in the past read as causing red smoke are highly carcinogenic/toxic hypergolic rocket fuels (hydrazine?), but I'm having a hard time imagining anyone storing a cache of that sort of thing anywhere near a built-up area. The form of the explosion here points in my mind to something significantly more explosive than fireworks (fireworks result in white smoke too, no?) - if nitrates are involved, that might certainly point in a better direction.
- wintorez 6y agoThe large explosion looked Thermobaric to me, which is not surprising since there were storing fuel there as well. I have a hunch that the red material could be some kind of grains, or construction material stored there as well.
- jandrewrogers 6y agoThe red material is almost certainly nitrogen dioxide, which is characteristic of spontaneous decomposition of nitrates. It is often associated with runaway exothermic reactions in nitrate chemistry and is generally a Bad Thing. Whatever reaction caused the spontaneous decomposition of nitrates was probably the catalyst for the much larger secondary explosion.
- wiml 6y agoI've read a number of reports saying that there was a large amount of sodium nitrate stored at the port (some sources say ammonium nitrate).
- detritus 6y agoJust read this too, and it's looking like it's just under three times what Timothy McVeigh unleashed in Oklahoma City. This kind of unnerves me a little. Seemingly, a couple of tons of this not-entirely-impossible-to-get-ahold-of-chemical could seriously screw up national infrastructure. We've had decades of fairly organised terrorism here in the UK, so perhaps I should know better, but it's a bit of a shock to realise that a 'manageable' quantity of otherwise fairly standard chemical stock is capable of producing something as dramatic as this.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- shock 6y agoAnyone know why this has been flagged?
- fjarlq 6y agoIt's off-topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- happytoexplain 6y agoI disagree, based on the same evidence you've linked.
- interestica 6y agoThis seems ideal as an HN post to me - generating fruitful discussion and bringing in various viewpoints and areas of expertise. And the fact that it's a current event means that people have a bit of leeway in speculation: we all have the same limited source of information (on the ground video).
- nouveaux 6y agoI agree. This has components of science and policy. There are people in the community who can contribute valuable insight.