Explosion in Beruit

I seriously would have shat myself thinking that was a nuke...until I realized I wasn't instantly vaporized. But damn it had the look for a few seconds.
 
Article I read earlier said may have been caused by a welder at the site. Accident not foul play. Welder started fire, fire made Ammonium Nitrate go boom.
 
Ah, back when science in school was fun! I vaguely remember an experiment where I made a toxic gas in class. My flask was noticeably higher concentration than the other students. The teacher told me to stop, slide it under the hood and crack the cover just a little and let it sit. Then there was the time I got hold of some potassium permanganate out of the lab store room...
Indeed!

Our junior high school chemistry lab was stocked with an amazing assortment of chemicals.

I did a demo for my fellow classmates and budding chemists/pyros about catalysts. This involved grounds up iodine crystals and aluminum dust (these were in a middle school chem lab, why??) with a few drops of water. I wonder if the dark maroon stain is still on the ceiling (we all bailed outside because of the fumes)

We later discovered that due to my budding interest in "science" I could order chemicals from the same supply house that provided the schools labs supplies. Oh heavenly days! No parents involved, and wholesale prices too, conveniently drop shipped to the school. YAY!

This lasted until the 2nd order , which IIRC was a pound of potassium chlorate and a big jug of aluminum dust.

Fortunately, because of the extremely poor judgment of the "Accelerated Science" teacher and her desire for continued employment, this never got reported, but the ordering priv's were revoked.
I love fire and big booms, but I never got to make any, you pyros!! I feel cheated!

I did try to burn a bathroom down when I was about 10, though....
 
Its always the welder. That submarine fire a few years ago, that aircraft carrier, and now a borderline nuclear explosion.
 
Its always the welder. That submarine fire a few years ago, that aircraft carrier, and now a borderline nuclear explosion.

I am very careful what, where, and how I weld (or grind for that matter). I don't wanna burn my house or shop down.

Years ago on a hot August day in the middle of a drought my neighbor burned all of his yard and part of his shop using an angle grinder.

Sparks and tinder is all it takes...
 
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Yep. A garage not far from me burned down a few months ago. Sparks and rags-
 
People like to cuss government agencies but since OSHA’s inception our rate of deadly explosions has become a small number number. Same thing happened here back in 1947 at Galveston Bay.
 
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Here’s a satellite before and after the explosion ...

DF4F43F6-5C78-4639-B237-63069E3049F1.jpeg

... the crater is huge but then I started looking that the metal building warehouses ... or should I say lack there of. That blast ripped up the sheet metal buildings like beer cans what I’d guess up to maybe a 1/2 mile away ... and other structures messed up for over a mile ... based on the “70m radius” indicated in the photo.
 
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Article I read earlier said may have been caused by a welder at the site. Accident not foul play. Welder started fire, fire made Ammonium Nitrate go boom.
We had bought new ramps for our hazardous waste and flammable storage building at the site @Bull Durham and I used to work at. They had someone come weld them on to the building so they didn't get stolen like the ramps that were being replaced. The welder showed up and started working without telling anyone, or if he did no one let anyone else know. We had a drum of waste inside the building at the time that we found out was off gassing hydrogen and methane. Besides that there were several hundred gallons of flammable waste and virgin methanol drums in the building. That guy was lucky. It wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad as this explosion, but people just don't think.
 
Its always the welder. That submarine fire a few years ago, that aircraft carrier, and now a borderline nuclear explosion.
The Con-Agra Slim Jim plant in Garner explosion was, if'n I recall properly, sparked from a welder installing 3" natural gas line and someone opened the valve.
20200806_071010.jpg
 
https://apnews.com/4475998de078a93bbe91b7ac9d43ada2
"The investigation is focusing on how 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, a highly explosive chemical used in fertilizers, came to be stored at the facility for six years, and why nothing was done about it."
"The blast tore out a crater 200 meters (yards) across that filled with seawater"
20200806_071933.jpg 20200806_071951.jpg
 
From what I've seen and read, an Iranian vessel was seized that contained "an illegal cargo of fireworks and ammonium nitrate" in 2014. Cargo was stored since then.

In a couple of the videos you can see and hear fireworks going off as the "raging fire" is burning. Then the big explosion happens. So if a welder caused this, they lit the fireworks first.
 
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Article I read earlier said may have been caused by a welder at the site. Accident not foul play. Welder started fire, fire made Ammonium Nitrate go boom.


Well I ain't no rocket scientist, but I thought that ammonium nitrate had to be mixed with fuel oil to go boom. So where did that come from. Or will it go boom all by itself?
 
Well I ain't no rocket scientist, but I thought that ammonium nitrate had to be mixed with fuel oil to go boom. So where did that come from. Or will it go boom all by itself?
Ammonium nitrate can cause an explosion without another fuel source, but only in very specific circumstances including a sustained source of high heat.
I do wonder why the blast wasn’t more red, the decomp should have created a lot of nitrogen dioxide, a red gas, and the only red gas I saw was prior to the big explosion.
 
Lock out , tag out!

That'd never work over there. Most Arabs are both arrogant & willfully ignorant beyond all reason. They'd either refuse to do it at all, or just ignore it & do whatever they hell they intended to anyway. One of the most dishonest & morally bankrupt cultures I have ever encountered.
 
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Who ever built that silo needs a trophy or ribbon or something. That mother trucker held strong.
 
Well I ain't no rocket scientist, but I thought that ammonium nitrate had to be mixed with fuel oil to go boom. So where did that come from. Or will it go boom all by itself?
Ammonium nitrate can cause an explosion without another fuel source, but only in very specific circumstances including a sustained source of high heat.
I do wonder why the blast wasn’t more red, the decomp should have created a lot of nitrogen dioxide, a red gas, and the only red gas I saw was prior to the big explosion.

I wonder if there were still fireworks stored there if they were the catalyst.
 
Who ever built that silo needs a trophy or ribbon or something. That mother trucker held strong.

Seriously. I would have bet the farm the silo was a contributor to the explosion. But there it sits. Mocking physics and explosives alike.
 
Don’t forget this is a seaport and the ammonium nitrate had supposedly been there 5 plus years so what had the heat, moisture and other “stuff” stored in there gone thru? Also where did this supposed Iranian ammonium nitrate come from? After McVeigh and 9/11 US fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate started to have an addictive to lessen sympathetic detonation chances ... I’m guessing the source of the supposed Iranian ammonium nitrate didn’t care as much.
 
Gas itself doesn't burn, the vapor does. Grain itself doesn't burn either, the dust does. An empty gas can is full of vapor and an empty grain bin is full of dust so yes, they can blow up.
Often the initial grain elevator explosion may be relatively minor, but stirs up any dust that has been allowed to collect on the structure, creating a larger dust cloud. The secondary explosion is the big one.
 
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Ammonium nitrate can cause an explosion without another fuel source, but only in very specific circumstances including a sustained source of high heat.
I do wonder why the blast wasn’t more red, the decomp should have created a lot of nitrogen dioxide, a red gas, and the only red gas I saw was prior to the big explosion.
I had read something similar, a large quantity under sustained temps. I think it melts and encapsulates itself or something like that.

Don’t forget this is a seaport and the ammonium nitrate had supposedly been there 5 plus years so what had the heat, moisture and other “stuff” stored in there gone thru? Also where did this supposed Iranian ammonium nitrate come from? After McVeigh and 9/11 US fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate started to have an addictive to lessen sympathetic detonation chances ... I’m guessing the source of the supposed Iranian ammonium nitrate didn’t care as much.
Key here is non-US. I believe it was actually on it's way to a munitions plant to make commercial explosives. So, they wouldn't want any suppressants.

Believed to be an image of the ammonium nitrate in warehouse #12 from a prior date...
31598126-8595359-image-m-6_1596638638494.jpg


Fire fighters attempting to open #12 before the blast. This was found on a phone of someone who did not survive.
beirut-port-explosion-01.jpg
 
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Does anyone believe the story about the Russian fertilizer abandoned there? Seriously? There was a big warehouse right on the port where ships docked and it sat there full of abandoned fertilizer for 5+ YEARS? Are you kidding me? If nothing else, somebody would have stolen the fertilizer long ago.

Who doesn’t think it was a Hezbollah ammo, bomb, and/or rocket factory?
 
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Looks like doctored footage.

I find it very odd that a company that's in the business of generating page views and clicks magically "found" new evidence pointing to a conspiracy.

Shocking new images show US complicity:

dr-strangelove-still-580.jpg
 
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