That was one hell of a schockwave.
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I was a Houston kid when the Texas City explosion happened, right down from the Hyde Park Funeral Home and mortuary training school. All hands on board went down to Texas City, gathered up body parts for embalming. Quite a few cow parts got embalmed too.
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There’s a large plume of a reddish nature that goes up just before the large explosion. I wonder if a bunker full of some kind of phosphorus-type material was breach?
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The latest report I read is that it was some kind of stored munitions, left over from fighting I guess. It sounds like they just warehoused everything in one place and didn’t consider what a fire would do. A shockwave like that from an explosion makes it very, very powerful…whatever was in the building was definitely packed close enough that the fire set some part of it off and the chain reaction hit the rest and it all went up at once. I’ll be surprised if only 50 people died, with that kind of power there’s a chance that bodies were vaporized and they will be counting the dead from missing person’s reports.
It’s the last thing Lebanon needed for sure…at some point you have to wonder if the world will ever get past the cycles of hate and suffering and everyone can live peacefully without fear of their city exploding.
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Vice News: The blast was felt 150 miles away. Glass windows were shattered 6 miles away.
Any statement from the Dumpsterfire? (I didn’t think so…)
From Vice:
French President Emmanuel Macron said “rescue and aid” were already on the way, while Britain, the EU, and Israel said they were ready to provide humanitarian support.
The World Health Organization said it was urgently working to make trauma supplies available, while he U.S. Pentagon said in a statement that it was “concerned for the potential loss of life due to such a massive explosion.”
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Yes, that very type of accident is exactly what the explosion looks like in the video
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I think we need to start thinking about learned sociopathy as a social problem.
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If you step through the frames as the second explosion begins, the shock wave appears to hit a very large set of concrete grain silos. If the explosion wrecked that building and mixed the grain/grain dust with air and then ignited it, it could have contributed significantly to the explosion.
And if the silos were instead for storing fertilizers like ammonium nitrate - even worse.
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We need to restore mental health funding in this country.
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Nitrogen Dioxide is reddish-brown and can form under high temperatures (fires). Nitrates are used both in some explosives and fertilizers.
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There may have been fireworks stored there, but I know that the detonation seen there was a hell of a lot more than wimpy fireworks. That looked like military-grade stuff, and a hell of a lot of it. I’m not talking pounds. I’m not even talking hundreds of pounds. I’m talking around a ton at least. Semi-rhetorical question: Now, who would store that amount of military-grade explosive at that location, unless it was meant to be detonated right there?
A secure military stores explosives inside significant bunkers where the explosion is dampened (and perhaps redirected) by surrounding THICK earthen walls.
ETA: I suppose you could generate an explosion like that with a really large, severe propane leak, similar to the Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) that is dropped as a large pallet out of a cargo plane and detonated when close to the ground.
and of course Trump blabbers about “attack” and “bomb of some kind”, without having any idea of what he’s talking about:
Note that this is news also in Beirut:
talking about an attack in Lebanon without any evidence, just to make stuff up to show that he knows everything when he knows nothing, is just criminal. At the moment, at most there is “suspicion”, and keeping 2,700 tons on ammonium nitrate is also criminal:
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CNN is reporting 2,700+ tons of stored ammonium nitrate caused the explosion.
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From what I briefly heard on CNN this morning, there was a warehouse that contained many tons of ammonium nitrate confiscated from a ship over six years ago, placed in that warehouse, and then ignored. All that would be needed to set this off is a good lightning strike or a fire.
Ammonium nitrate is what Timothy McVeigh (yeah, that mass-murdering right-wing-nut) used to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. He accomplished this with enough of the chemical to fill a single rental truck. Imagine what you could do with the many tons usually in a cargo shipment. Ammonium nitrate is most frequently used for manufacturing fertilizer…lots of nitrogen for plants…but can also be used for mining when explosives are needed. One other use is IEDs. It used to be mined many years ago, but it is almost always synthesized nowadays.