10 ms·
For all the horror, at least this happened at the quayside and half the explosive force radiated away almost harmlessly over the sea. That basically halved the
by qubex 6y ago
For all the horror, at least this happened at the quayside and half the explosive force radiated away almost harmlessly over the sea. That basically halved the actual destruction at the outset. If it had been in the middle of the city, there would have been twice the damage. This much is fairly obvious.
What isn’t quite so obvious is that roughly half the energy was also wasted upwards, and that a startlingly worse case would have been if the explosives had been slightly interred, coupling the blast more closely to the ground and enhancing amplitude of the p-waves and providing plenty of really substantial debris raining down after basically ‘earth-quaking’ the buildings.
Roughly combining the two 50% ‘wastages’ leaves you with about only one quarter of the energy was actually really channeled into destruction, which I’m going to be charitable and call a third. In ‘ideal’ conditions you might’ve had three times as much devastation, and that’s a pretty shocking thing to consider, given the actual carnage.
NOTE: I had appended these considerations in a more inchoate form to the tail-end of another comment, but I figured I’d make them an item of their own and tidy them up a bit. Apologies for the duplication.
- FartyMcFarter 6y agoThe grain store probably shielded a lot of other infrastructure and people too. However it seems very irresponsible to keep 85% of the country's grain in a single spot. It's scary how so many single points of failure exist.
- qubex 6y agoYeah I’ve been thinking about that too... harsh as it may sound, big concrete cylinders fillded with loose grain is pretty much the best pillow to cushion the blow you could think of. EDIT: As for the grain silos being “single points of failure”, that depends on the scope of the system you’re considering. Nationally, yeah... but internationally, there’s plenty and it’s being shipped in. So there’s actually more redundancy than the narrow-scope analysis would suggest. The 85% figure is just a figment of where one draws the borders, and national borders probably don’t have much valence in the given context (fortunately). Now, if we were speaking about 85% of the world’s ability to ship grain... now that would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
- HPsquared 6y agoThere probably won't be much shipping of any kind in that port for a while... Hopefully they can make other arrangements.
- secondcoming 6y agoI did consider that the dust present in a grain silo could make made a 'flour bomb' and compounded the explosion. Maybe not
- qubex 6y agoTo be perfectly honest, that was my very first reaction when I first watched the video: it looked like the fuming aftermath of Something Really Bad, and then BOOM! Something Really Bad unfolded on-screen. I figured that it must’ve been some kind of aerosol/powder combustion triggered by the fireworks’ conflagration, but then more learned analyses of cloud hue and knowledge of what was actually stored in situ (correctly) overrode my initial reaction and the fertilizer was identified as the main culprit.
- jakub_g 6y agoThere have been some works to expand the Tripoli port to avoid single point of failure, but apparently (from the podcast I heard) they've been going slow for political reasons (including regular people of Beirut profiting from the near-monopoly).
- anonu 6y agoLebanon is a tiny country, the size of Connecticut. There are a lot of things that were irresponsible in this story in Beirut, but I don't think the grain silo is one of them
- jacquesm 6y ago> half the energy No, half of the remaining energy. You can't discard two halves and expect to have something left.
- qubex 6y agoI’m not subtracting, I’m multiplying fractions. Half stayed on-shore; of that half, half went into the sky. That’s half of a half which is a quarter, which I’m rounding up to a third because later I take the reciprocal so the higher proportion is a more conservative estimate.
- agumonkey 6y agoSomeone said that a small cracker on your open hand would hurt and burn, but if held closed in your fist, you'd have a hole in it.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoPlenty of footage and images on the internets what happens when you hold fireworks in your hand. Not so much a hole as your fingers get shredded / blown off.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoThe commenter above was talking about a literal wheat cracker, not a firecracker. They were mentioning how much energy is actually stored in grain(it's a lot).
- spdustin 6y agoNo, I don't believe so. I believe they were indeed talking about a small explosive load, like a firecracker.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoOn second thought, I think you're right. A cracker in a closed hand would get snuffed out.
- agumonkey 6y agowell 1) lack of vocabulary on my side, I meant small stick like explosive for celebrations (1x6cm) 2) you might be right I didn't pursue video evidences of shredded fingers and stayed with the dude saying
- michaelcampbell 6y agoHaha, no, he wasn't. He was talking ... well, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk9MK5smzVE&t=3m44s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk9MK5smzVE&t=3m44s
- brownbat 6y agoI wonder how much of that was by design, if any. An old friend used to work in a chemical factory in, must have been Minnesota in the 60s or 70s. She would talk about how they had a row of sheds with three walls for mixing certain dangerous chemicals. Each shed had an open or really thin wall facing the river. If one went up, well, that person was probably gone, but at least it wouldn't start a chain reaction. It would explode in exactly one direction -- away from the plant, away from all the other dangerous chemical sheds.
- erie 6y agoYou are assuming few things here, first there were victims on the water front,a cruise ship sank with people on it and other, one survived "Beirut Port Worker Thrown Into Sea by Explosion Found ALIVE 30 Hours Later" the explosion left a 43-meter (141 foot) deep crater.NYTIMES:" U.S. Contractor Knew of Explosive Material in Beirut Since at Least 2016 An American contractor spotted and reported the potential danger at least four years ago, but U.S. officials denied they were aware of the findings until last week, after the blast."
- qubex 6y agoYes I’m assuming a huge number of things, but that’s the nature of ballpark figures and estimation. We’re well into “spherical cow” territory here.