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A comparable explosion happened in Toulouse, France, in 2001, estimated at 20-40 tons of TNT. It was also some nitrate storage that blew up. Similar end result, pretty much everything window in the city was blown away, and most of the injuries were caused by broken glass.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention that you don't need to store 2750 tonnes of it in a warehouse in a harbour in a large city like Beirut.
The natural heat was the killer. IF twitter was right the fire started from sparks from a welding on a door. The AN must have already been decomposing in the heat and under weight just waiting. I wonder how often this storage facility was at a critical point like this. Like how many hot days. How often before this. It makes you think about all the other risks sitting out there just waiting for a small spark.
https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1290681902781861888?s=...
@quantian1 correctly determined that this was an ammonium nitrate blast by analyzing the footage: https://twitter.com/quantian1/status/1290695231910875136 CHEMISTRY FACT: Explosives have characteristic "detonation velocities" at which shockwaves expand. Smartphone video records at 30 FPS, so the adjacent frames here suggest the front expands at ~100 m/(1/30 sec), or 3,000 m/sec. Consistent with ammonium nitrate, not…
(utter newbie here): "Explosives have characteristic "detonation velocities" at which shockwaves expand" but the detonation velocity isn't that; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detonation_velocity "Explosive velocity, also known as detonation velocity or velocity of detonation (VoD), is the velocity at which the shock wave front travels through a detonated explosive." I assume that for an infintely sharp explosion…
Al Jazeera is reporting that according to the president in Lebanon, it was almost three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate that blew up https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/huge-explosion-rocks-... .
It's hard to imagine, but that would mean this explosion was nearly 3.5x larger than 2015 Tianjin[1] which was 800 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (336 tons TNT equivalent). The video[2] from Tianjin looked way bigger and apocalyptic, but perhaps just because of the the fireball. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Tianjin_explosions [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONsmJAyFAAw
Two ships loading ammonium nitrate, the Grandcamp and the High Flyer, detonated in Texas City back in 1947.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster
It says there was a 15 ft wave out into the Gulf of Mexico that lasted for almost 100 miles.
And Texas City is not actually on the Gulf Coast, it is on Galveston Bay about a half hour away from the Gulf shore. And there is only a relatively narrow channel opening from the bay into the gulf.
There are ton-sized pieces of shrapnel still in a few places across the town.
I was stationed there in the early '80's when I was 20-something and everyone my age or older had parents & grandparents who had been through it, some surviving some not.
Now it's been twice as many decades and it's not as present, elements of recovery come into reach that are not possible the first few years or decades.
Nitpicking here maybe but this does not look like a 3 kiloton blast to me. Neither the size of the core explosion or the apparent shock wave damage correspond to that magnitude from a surface blast. Guessing here but I'd say closer to 2 kilotons at most. Amazingly, the massive, hollow grain silo right next to the detonation itself remained standing afterwards.
(not saying it is one, just for comparison of how insanely massive this explosion is)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can decrease such risks by mixing carbonate minerals (calcium-carbonate and magnesium carboante) into the AN fertilizer, as done in EU counties (and probably in the rest of the world as well).
Not to mention that you don't need to store 2750 tonnes of it in a warehouse in a harbour in a large city like Beirut.
When they started talking about ammonium nitrate, my first thought was of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos... and the possibility of a shipment of fertilizer somehow getting caught in a fire ...
List of Ammonium nitrate disasters
This video [1] from The Guardian include the same video in that tweet, but also has a few other angles which gives a better appreciation of how big that thing was. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93tV6-0Ugwk
I had only seen the headlines about this, but had not investigated anything until seeing this video. That's a much larger explosion than I was expecting.
This video [1] from The Guardian include the same video in that tweet, but also has a few other angles which gives a better appreciation of how big that thing was. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93tV6-0Ugwk
This video is the one that made me gasp the hardest: https://twitter.com/FadyRoumieh/status/1290670721488900096 Something about the distance and the fact that it's on water puts everything into stark relief.