BEIRUT (AP) — A massive explosion shook Lebanon’s capital Beirut on Tuesday wounding a number people and causing widespread damage.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1324006
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1324006
Awful, really awful, in a country already next to economic collapse
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Must have been tons of explosiveo stuff to do what you can see on instagram from a boat.
Jeebus!!
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Honestly it could be Syria/Russia at this point stirring the pot. Its the desire to reach the sea after Syria’s Assad allied himself with Putin and the US basically gave up on defending and standing with the Kurds. This chaos actually benefits those two dictators much more than the criminally indicted Netanyahu, but who knows anymore. One thing I do know, tRump is no more prepared to deal with this situation if called on to do so than he is any other problem or catastrophe around the world. He can’t even focus for a minute on the calamity happening here at home primarily because ignoring things, for him, is so much easier. And when he does involve himself due to pure self-interest, he often makes things so much worse.
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Where firecrackers are stored ? I’m no expert but that looks like a helluva lot of firecrackers going of to me. How many firecrackers do the people of Beirut go thru in a given day ?
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There was a major religious festival earlier this week. One would think the fireworks – if these were fireworks – would have been safely depleted during the festivities.
Dammit! Beirut used to be one of the most beautiful cities in the Middle East. The ‘Paris’ of the Mid East. I was there in the 80’s and it was already being destroyed.
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Somebody sabotage someone else’s cargo of explosives.
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That did not look like fireworks. I doubt they would all go off in a single, massive blast. I sure hope it wasn’t as bad as it looks for the people in the area.
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Not an expert and there are so many possibilities but the 1947 Texas City Disaster springs to mind. Massive ammonium nitrate explosion following a fire.
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I’m afraid it’s really bad, unfortunately. When it happened, I was actually talking on zoom with one of my students, who is from Beirut, but lives here in the US at the moment. He sent me pictures sent from his family, their home is a few miles away from the explosions: it was like after an earthquake, luckily only his brother got injured, and only a minor wound at one hand. He took it better than I did, I’m still shocked
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On Google Maps, the building in front that goes up in the second explosion is called “Beirut port silos” – it makes me wonder if the silos had particulate matter in them of the kind that leads grain silos to spontaneously explode. That is, it might have been a smaller explosion alongside the silos, and (perhaps by design?) then the second mushroom cloud, which did not seem to have a fireball like an explosive-based blast.
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This is just horrible. Meantime, back here on the ranch, Republicans still refuse to cooperate in crafting legislation that will get us through the present and pending moments of health and economic crises. How can you be immune to the sufferings of others?
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Fireworks in large quantities are deadly. People treat them like they are all just finger popperd, but I can tell you that a ton and a half of confiscated fireworks was enough to kill three Army EOD technicians and destroy the bunker they were working in. The military munitions in the bunker melted without detonating, but the fireworks we were storing for the ATF folks all went up.
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We were lucky enough to spend a week in Beirut two years ago. Despite the years of war, it remains one of the great cities of the world. What a tragedy.
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Reported 50 dead, 3,000 injured.
Damn
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In the video being circulatedthat was taken offshore the port, you can see the initial fire, with some fireworks apparently going off in the smoke. Unsurprising sort of storage nightmare. Then - the building next door goes off in that horriffic mushroom cloud, causing the devastation we’re seeing now across the city. Whatever was in there – fertilizer, bombs, who knows – was massive.
This is really, really dreadful for a city and a nation that has enough woe to go around already.
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Ya. That’s nonsense. The “popping” seen in various videos is surely ammunition going off. I rather doubt that you could pack a building that large with enough fireworks to result in both the size of the explosion or create that kind of shock wave.
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Both Lebanon and Syria we nice before they made all the foreigners leave in the 70s.
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