Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/05/satellite-image-reveals-crater.html
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It’s pretty devastating… everyone complains about safety laws and codes in the US, but most of them are there because people died at some point in history.
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Making me want to imagine the overpressure isobar lines that we use in our process safety hazard analysis work.
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Last night, some of the popular websites I frequent (imgur etc…) lit up with first hand accounts of the explosion. This overhead shows the sheer power of the explosion (to leave a crater like this), but the first hand “on the ground” videos are truly frightening. A lot of people were filming it because of the fire, and smaller pre-explosions, so when the big explosion happened, there were people all over visual range making videos. The shockwave was impressive.
A bit of a warning though: A lot of the firsthand videos (at least the videos whose filmers survived to post) show the street level aftermath as well, which is pretty traumatic. So, if you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, definitely don’t seek out these explosion videos.
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That dockside warehouse must have been taking up valuable space. Strange that an old shipment of fertilizer would just get left there for years.
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I was playing with Nukemap which does just that and since Ammonium Nitrate is about 1/2 as powerful as TNT, I declared it to be a 1.3 kt bomb (2700 tons of fertilizer). Took out the radiation and heat effects.
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A crater the size of a football field.
Damn.
"The diameter of the Beirut crater created by Tuesday’s explosion appears to be roughly 124 meters — or about 405 feet, according to a CNN analysis of a Planet Labs, Inc. satellite image.
That distance means the crater is well over a football field in length.
CNN utilized geospatial software to measure the satellite imagery of the explosion site. The assessment is accurate within 10 meters." -CNN
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It’s pretty interesting that the grain silos held up at all considering they were so close. That grain absorbed a lot of shock.
Not that that helped protect the buildings just on the other side of it. I guess that’s due to the fire and not the shockwave.
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What an amazing gif.
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NBC has a couple of sliding before and after images.
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Dammit, 2020, you suck so much.
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IIRC they are also reinforced concrete, way sturdier than the other buildings in the area.
Silos are known to combust and explode, hence they are build strong. Initially I assumed that the neighboring fire is what touched them off.
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I did some checking on the TNT equivalence this morning, and found (as you did) that it was well within the range of tactical nukes’ yields (and stronger than some of them). Damn.
My heart goes out to the people of Beirut.
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I have no words.
My sympathies to the people of Beirut.
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Imagine being on (or owning) one of the ships tied up there.
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The explosion was about the strength of the biggest during the Pepcon disaster, the big difference being that Pepcon was in the middle of a desert and this was right on the edge of a major city. The footage is absolutely horrific.
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That seems pretty accurate on the crater but vastly underestimates the damage that was actually seen.
Visual guide: how explosion caused mass casualties and devastation across Beirut
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This reminds me of my college chemistry teacher explaining how any compounds with nitrogen in them tend to come apart explosively, eventually. It’s a real shame that the keepers of that warehouse didn’t have that sage bit of advice in mind.
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I was noticing the same. Whatever construction techniques they used in the grain silos were a lot better than everything else. Makes me wonder who did the construction project for the silos.
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AN is routinely stored in low-tech facilities all over the world. It is not considered that physically dangerous in that it is quite stable. Obviously, when conditions are right, or motivations are wrong, that ain’t so. But it is usually safe.
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