Insane explosion at Port of Beirut
 

Looks like several tons of nitrates exploded at the Port of Beirut just moments ago. Took out a good part of the city.


Some of the video posted to Twitter is amazing:

https://twitter.com/search?q=Beirut


Very reminiscent of the accident in Galveston / Texas City in 1947

Yeah, or the October 1983 nitrate explosion under the Marine barracks.

Inshallah...

https://i.ibb.co/7jwGnZD/522-F5-C84-...88-A4-C6-E.jpg

Probably either LNG or fertilizer. Very sad, not like Beirut hasn't been through enough.

There were some sort of secondaries triggered by the fire which looked a lot like munitions, but a single blast like that would have required a massive quantity of something... that was at the low end of tac nuke size. Can't imagine why anybody would try to import (smuggle) that much military explosives into Beirut in one lot.

At 2111Z, the government announced 2,750 tones of ammonium nitrate was stored in the building, which explains a lot. How it was detonated is the next question, videos shows lots of small sparkler lights going off just before KA-*********ng BOOM,

Looks a lot like secondaries from a munitions cache. Small arms ammo, or not-so-small arms ammo cooking off.

But the big explosion has to be fertilizer, there's no LNG tanks I can see and nobody (not even tangos) would store that much HE in a place like that.

According to early reports, a Lebanese Port Safety official had sent at least six memos over the past six years complaining of the storage of so much ammonium nitrate in an unsafe, unsecured, and unsterile location.

A retired ATF agent also commented that while the explosion is consistent with Ammonium Nitrate, the color of the blast (red) would indicate something else was also involved.

[QUOTE that was at the low end of tac nuke size. QUOTE]

Right. One of the nukes I dealt with in the Army was a 2 kiloton TNT equivalent. This was 2.7 kilotons of basically fertilizer, but they are in the same ballpark.

The crazy thing about nukes is how those low-yield warheads are incredibly bad in terms of radioactivity and outfall, vs. the huge megaton range that has has almost no residual radiation. The cleanest ever was the USSR Tsar bomb, which was tested at only half of it's capability, vs. the smaller tactical nukes that severely poison the environment wherever they happen to be used.

Ammonium Nitrate and Fuel Oil are used to blast rock in road cuts. The Fuel Oil kick starts the fire. The Ammonium Nitrate is the explosive. Also, very valuable as fertilizer. Storage and handling must be done with care. Obviously taken for granted there. Sad.