I know it wasn’t a bomb. You know it wasn’t a bomb. But try telling that to my President DJT.
I used this Tonnes to Kilotones (Metric) converter, then looked up the yield of Little Boy to come to my conclusion. Is there a handy online converter for Ammonium Nitrate to TNT explosions? I’m not good enough at math to use your charts,
Could’ve been worse had the explosion happened high in the air, as in Hiroshima. Half of the blast went into the sea too, which is fortunate.
Done that
You can compare detonation velocities or things like CJ pressures but you really need to know the application.
Per a table in our favorite online encyclopedia, dry AN is 42% of TNT. Adding a fuel like oil which also ups the density and you get 72%. Add other fuels or, even better, liquid explosives and you get pretty close to TNT.
The paper, though it promises a firm result, isn’t that clear. For fertilizer grade Ammonium Nitrate, between 3 and 14 percent equivalent TNT. Technical grade Ammonium Nitrate is more explosive (10-32 percent equivalent). I suppose that if one were experienced at this sort of thing, one could estimate overpresssure at various radii from what’s known from building damage, and obtain an equivalence from there.
Overpressure can kill but it depends on too many variables.
So not a suitcase nuke.
This photo is supposedly the warehouse where the chemicals were stored, not long before the tragedy.
Downhill, I hope.
Well ventilated, fresh, farm grade ammonium nitrate is way less of a fire risk. Poorly stored, confined aging ammonium nitrate stored with who knows what contaminants is a very different beast. Assuming the AN was pure and stable when placed in the warehouse (not even a sound assumption), the passage of time allows it to degrade allowing for the build up of various nitrogen gasses and who knows what could leach out of the warehouse itself. There is also the real possibility that some or all of a shipment of seized AN was already mixed with something that changes the risk. It will probably be years before we have a really good analysis of the complete chain of events.
A quick back of the envelope calculation. Pardon my mixing of units.
The bags in the picture are 1000kg bags, or one ton. Roughly 1 cubic meter (so probably prilled, with a poor packing ratio). They are stacked 2 high.
3000 tons then would occupy a volume roughly equivalent to a small warehouse. So the math works.
It looks like the grain silos acted as a shield for most of the city. Plus, there were no large buildings between it and the water, so a lot of it dissipated. Best case scenario for a worst case scenario.
It’s pretty flat here.
The type of explosive also matters (ie high explosive vs low explosive). High explosives do more damage because they explode at speeds greater than the speed of sound and from what i can tell AN is considered a high explosive (an improvised one at least), with the amount that went up it was pretty much a worse case scenario for Beirut.
Man just looking at that video of the explosion and the vapor cloud of the shockwave is really horrifying. I’m really saddened for the people of the city.
I frequently visit the USGS Latest Earthquakes page, and fuck if that blast didn’t register as a 3.3 magnitude event!
If you fiddle w/the date settings it shows up again - default is past 24hrs.
Yeah, this POV is nightmare material…
Nightmare is right! @_@
You can still find it here, if you select the feed “GFZ” (GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam/Germany). But it will be gone soon, the feed covers only 24 hours.
High explosives (like C4) are more commonly used in blasting or cutting operations where the intent is to shock the material but leave it in place. Controlled implosions, underground blasting, dropping bridges, that sort of thing.
Low explosives (like TNT) tend to move a lot of material out of the way. So, quarrying operations, clearing ditches, making big holes. Intent is to displace material.
Of course if you leave 3000 tons of it laying about it doesnt really matter which it is.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
