YazataAug 4, 2020 06:48 PM (This post was last modified: Aug 4, 2020 10:00 PM by Yazata.)
Massive. Looks like the size of a small tactical nuclear weapon. Video shows a plume of smoke, suggesting an existing fire, then a massive detonation and a hemispherical shock-wave encompassing much of the city. Windows were blown in all over downtown, balconies were blown off apartment buildings, and reports of bodies in the streets. Looks like much of Beirut's port is destroyed. Lebanese red cross reports that there are hundreds of casualties as a result of the explosion, including dead and wounded. There are reports that the explosion was heard in Cyprus, 234 km away.
Doesn't appear to be terrorism, at least at first glance. Looks more like a fire in a warehouse used to store explosives. (Which may or may not belong to one of those weird Lebanese militias like Hezbollah.
Edit: The Lebanese government is saying that it was a fire at a warehouse used to store Ammonium Nitrate, which can be very explosive. Lebanese are demanding to know why such dangerous material was allowed to be stored in a highly populated area. National day of mourning announced in Lebanon.
The first tweet below is mind-boggling. Somebody in a high-rise was videoing the big warehouse fire at the port when the explosion happened. You can see the shockwave approaching and hitting.
This is ripe for a conspiracy theory. Hezbollah, the Mossad, spies, American intelligence, tipped-off, more than just a couple of ‘Burning Schoolhouses’ stored there....hmmm.
They say that 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate were stored at the city's port since September 2013, according to Lebanese government sources. It arrived on a freighter that had been abandoned by its crew and owners. So the port officials unloaded the chemical into a warehouse and then ignored it.
Photographs show that there was a large fire at the port with a large plume of white smoke. Suddenly a spherical condensation cloud expanded away, followed by an even larger plume of reddish-brown smoke.
"Many chemists on twitter identified that color as being a signature of NO2 gas, possibly produced from the incomplete decomposition of ammonium nitrate. Others also used the video footage to estimate the detonation velocity of the explosion as being around 3,000 m/s, which is also consistent with an explosion involving ammonium nitrate."
Condensing a more detailed discussion, ammonium nitrate molecules can apparently become unstable when heated in a fire. The molecules break apart and the two halves are very reactive. They react very exothermically producing a lot of heat. Starting from a solid, all the reaction products suddenly are gas, which produces a pressure wave that propagates at supersonic velocity, producing a detonation.
"The condensation cloud caused by the blast led some people on social media to speculate that the explosion was caused by a nuclear device. But these types of clouds can also occur with a large enough conventional explosion in humid air, Sella [the University College London chemist the magazine interviewed] says. What happens, he says, is that immediately behind the shock wave is an area of lower pressure that causes water to condense into microscopic droplets."
And lots of other stuff.
Apparently the color of this plume is a tell-tale to chemists.
Aug 4, 2020 06:48 PM
(This post was last modified: Aug 4, 2020 10:00 PM by Yazata.)
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