>To my mind these are roughly equivilent amounts of raw explosive agent. Perhaps, but in terms of TNT equivalence picric acid is much more effective at 96% com

>To my mind these are roughly equivilent amounts of raw explosive agent. Perhaps, but in terms of TNT equivalence picric acid is much more effective at 96% compared to 56% of ammonium nitrate[0] with other estimates being even wider[1] i.e., 1.17x for picric acid to 0.74x for ANFO and 0.42x for ammonium nitrate, and some other figures are placing ammonium nitrate as low as 20% as effective. With the estimates ranging from a low 500 tonnes, ~1.2 kilotonnes for a reasonable estimate up to about a maximum ~2.2 kilotonnes based on 2,750 tonnes of ANFO it's looking like the two explosions aren't that comparable. But I do agree, early estimates of loss of life can be troublesome and both explosions were devastatingly large. [0] https://www.icheme.org/media/12120/xi-paper-13.pdf https://www.icheme.org/media/12120/xi-paper-13.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Relative_effectiveness_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Relative_effect...