"In November 2018, I was away from Beirut, briefly, for work. One morning I woke up to find a deluge of WhatsApp messages from various friends and relatives, all forwarding the same few videos. There had been a terrible storm. At one point, hail the size of fists had fallen. In one of the videos, shoppers run screaming as it smashes into the courtyard of a fancy mall. In another, a woman holds up a plastic chair on her balcony, so punched through with holes it looks like Swiss cheese. There are brutalized cars, felled trees and electricity poles, a man water-skiing on the northern coastal highway, mudslides in the quarries. The last was of the boulevard overlooking Ramlet el-Baida beach. The water was almost hip-deep, if the drowned cars parked on the side of the road were anything to measure by.
But it wasn’t water: it was shit. Exploding so forcefully up from the depths that the sewer covers danced atop the flumes, like in a cartoon. Yes, Eden Bay, and all its enablers, had caused a literal shitstorm."
That sounds plausible - it won’t be fireworks alone, black powder won’t make that kind of bang. Ammonium nitrate would fit the bill, too, which is the sort of thing you often have in warehouses or bulk carriers in quantities that would make an explosion of that order.
Honestly, it’s somewhat amazing that this kind of thing doesn’t happen far more often than the ~1 incident per year, globally.
A friend of mine worked in EOD (explosive ordinance disposal) and related fields. I got to talk with him once about all this. One of the primary thing that reduces the rate of accidents is people following the rules. Basically, there are rules that say, based on mass, how far apart different things need to be from each other. It also varies by the kind of explosive (as different explosives have different triggers like heat or concussion). [0] is like the tables he showed me (his were more complex and dealt with specifically named explosives, not the broader categories this one describes).
Grain is a pretty poor explosive because the upper and lower explosive limits are so close (yes I know that's not traditionally a metric we use for solids), it needs an oxidier and the volume of byproduct for volume of input is relatively low.
But large amounts of grain and oxygen are often found together in confined spaces so that makes it more explosive in practice than most things that people who work in offices and don't deal in bulk goods come into contact with.
Can you elaborate what "upper and lower explosive limits" are, please.
Also I don't understnd how it could be explosive at all, sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?
concentration of the fuel in otherwise normal atmospheric air required to go whoosh (or bang, which is basically just a really fast woosh or one that's constrained by something).
Too much fuel, too rich, no woosh.
Too little fuel, too lean, no woosh.
Lower and upper explosive limits are generally used to refer to gas mixtures though you can use them for solids but the units will be different. Solids we think of as explosive when not fishing around for virtue points on the internet generally contain their own oxygen supply so lower and upper explosive limit doesn't apply.
>sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?
Yeah, no way that secondary explosion is flour or grain. I'd put my money on some sort of industrial chemical that contains its own oxidizer. Explosions that use atmospheric oxygen look different and rarely manage to be able to build up that kind of shock-wave if not constrained by something (like a building). There should be videos of natural gas explosions on YouTube that illustrate the difference.
Most grain elevators have incredibly large quantities of dust (basically flour) lying around, it's just unavoidable when you're moving that much grain around.
If it's too dry, there's a risk of static/friction/electrical ignition.
If it gets wet, you can have anaerobic bacteria build up heat in a compartment that, when exposed to oxygen, ignites.
Grew up on a farm, have a fair bit of experience messing around with grain bins. Our local elevator had a fire due to the former condition, and our neighbor's barn burned down due to the latter.
If there was a large enough explosions to blast the grain silos into the air and disperse the grain, it could find that "perfect" balance at some point and then flash over.
The first fire (pre-big-explosion) clearly is taking place in a warehouse next to the grain silos. The big explosion appears to take place in the same warehouse as well.
A single frame of the fireball shows a large spherical fireball whose edge maybe reaches the edge of the grain silos. The next frame looks to my untrained eyes more like the edge of the fireball is having some reflection from the wall of the grain silos, followed by a dark cloud obscuring details, and then the vapor cloud really obscuring everything, and finally the photographer falling over.
It seems pretty clear to me that grain played no role in the big explosion.
I've seen one report that cites the Lebanese government that it was sodium nitrate seized from a ship that was temporarily stored there and was slated to be moved.
Looks like this [0] is the place, judging by the angle from video [1] (take the building with the red cupola south of there and the building in the harbor as reference).
Looks like a fuel air explosion to me; perhaps the fireworks factory popped a large LNG tank, which flowed out until it hit an ignitable diffusion; which then blew the rest of the tank farm open and caused the next front.
This is what I've been trying to work out, but am having problems Googling for suggestions. The only things I've in the past read as causing red smoke are highly carcinogenic/toxic hypergolic rocket fuels (hydrazine?), but I'm having a hard time imagining anyone storing a cache of that sort of thing anywhere near a built-up area.
The form of the explosion here points in my mind to something significantly more explosive than fireworks (fireworks result in white smoke too, no?) - if nitrates are involved, that might certainly point in a better direction.
The large explosion looked Thermobaric to me, which is not surprising since there were storing fuel there as well. I have a hunch that the red material could be some kind of grains, or construction material stored there as well.
The red material is almost certainly nitrogen dioxide, which is characteristic of spontaneous decomposition of nitrates. It is often associated with runaway exothermic reactions in nitrate chemistry and is generally a Bad Thing. Whatever reaction caused the spontaneous decomposition of nitrates was probably the catalyst for the much larger secondary explosion.
Just read this too, and it's looking like it's just under three times what Timothy McVeigh unleashed in Oklahoma City.
This kind of unnerves me a little.
Seemingly, a couple of tons of this not-entirely-impossible-to-get-ahold-of-chemical could seriously screw up national infrastructure.
We've had decades of fairly organised terrorism here in the UK, so perhaps I should know better, but it's a bit of a shock to realise that a 'manageable' quantity of otherwise fairly standard chemical stock is capable of producing something as dramatic as this.
Most, yes, but then I'm unsure how complex it'd be for a well off and invested actor to play a 'shell game' with a few containers and get one of them filled with nasties into a major metropolis after a circuitous route.
The nitrates in question here apparently ended up in Lebanon after coming from Brazil via Mozambique.
The orange from hypergolic propellants is the oxidizer (nitrogen dioxide from the dinitrogen tetroxide disassociating at atmospheric pressure and temperature), not the fuel (typically hydrazine/UDMH these days, formerly analine was popular, many other fuels are hypergolic with N02/N204).
If the reports are correct that the explosion is 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, the orange is probably nitrogen dioxide. A high concentration of nitrogen dioxide indicates that the explosion was very oxygen-rich, likely pointing to it being accidental.
Ammonium nitrate is normally very very stable. Even mixed optimally with fuel oil, ammonium nitrate prills (pellets) won't reliably detonate with a No. 8 blasting cap, and in mining a small "booster" charge of TNT is used to get the ANFO going. However, very large piles of ammonium nitrate have caught fire and exploded, such as the Texas City disaster where a tanker full of ammonium nitrate burned for a long time, and then levelled a good portion of the town when it exploded.
This seems ideal as an HN post to me - generating fruitful discussion and bringing in various viewpoints and areas of expertise. And the fact that it's a current event means that people have a bit of leeway in speculation: we all have the same limited source of information (on the ground video).
42 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 93.1 ms ] thread"In November 2018, I was away from Beirut, briefly, for work. One morning I woke up to find a deluge of WhatsApp messages from various friends and relatives, all forwarding the same few videos. There had been a terrible storm. At one point, hail the size of fists had fallen. In one of the videos, shoppers run screaming as it smashes into the courtyard of a fancy mall. In another, a woman holds up a plastic chair on her balcony, so punched through with holes it looks like Swiss cheese. There are brutalized cars, felled trees and electricity poles, a man water-skiing on the northern coastal highway, mudslides in the quarries. The last was of the boulevard overlooking Ramlet el-Baida beach. The water was almost hip-deep, if the drowned cars parked on the side of the road were anything to measure by.
But it wasn’t water: it was shit. Exploding so forcefully up from the depths that the sewer covers danced atop the flumes, like in a cartoon. Yes, Eden Bay, and all its enablers, had caused a literal shitstorm."
Honestly, it’s somewhat amazing that this kind of thing doesn’t happen far more often than the ~1 incident per year, globally.
[0] https://www.atf.gov/explosives/table-distances
[0]https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/huge-explosion-rocks-...
But large amounts of grain and oxygen are often found together in confined spaces so that makes it more explosive in practice than most things that people who work in offices and don't deal in bulk goods come into contact with.
Also I don't understnd how it could be explosive at all, sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?
concentration of the fuel in otherwise normal atmospheric air required to go whoosh (or bang, which is basically just a really fast woosh or one that's constrained by something).
Too much fuel, too rich, no woosh.
Too little fuel, too lean, no woosh.
Lower and upper explosive limits are generally used to refer to gas mixtures though you can use them for solids but the units will be different. Solids we think of as explosive when not fishing around for virtue points on the internet generally contain their own oxygen supply so lower and upper explosive limit doesn't apply.
>sudden oxidation of large (that is, low surface area to volume), non-dry particles seems unlikely. Flour etc. may be another matter, but a blast like this... flour?
Yeah, no way that secondary explosion is flour or grain. I'd put my money on some sort of industrial chemical that contains its own oxidizer. Explosions that use atmospheric oxygen look different and rarely manage to be able to build up that kind of shock-wave if not constrained by something (like a building). There should be videos of natural gas explosions on YouTube that illustrate the difference.
If it's too dry, there's a risk of static/friction/electrical ignition.
If it gets wet, you can have anaerobic bacteria build up heat in a compartment that, when exposed to oxygen, ignites.
Grew up on a farm, have a fair bit of experience messing around with grain bins. Our local elevator had a fire due to the former condition, and our neighbor's barn burned down due to the latter.
A single frame of the fireball shows a large spherical fireball whose edge maybe reaches the edge of the grain silos. The next frame looks to my untrained eyes more like the edge of the fireball is having some reflection from the wall of the grain silos, followed by a dark cloud obscuring details, and then the vapor cloud really obscuring everything, and finally the photographer falling over.
It seems pretty clear to me that grain played no role in the big explosion.
They were in a tough spot already before this happened :-/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_cloud
https://twitter.com/AnalysisTwd/status/1290698045802373122
[0] https://www.bing.com/maps?osid=e851aed9-b5df-495a-89e8-5c53d...
[1] https://twitter.com/JeonggukJeon__/status/129068971722728243...
https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290681231693275136
See also this tweet:
https://twitter.com/N_Waters89/status/1290688278094647298
The form of the explosion here points in my mind to something significantly more explosive than fireworks (fireworks result in white smoke too, no?) - if nitrates are involved, that might certainly point in a better direction.
This kind of unnerves me a little.
Seemingly, a couple of tons of this not-entirely-impossible-to-get-ahold-of-chemical could seriously screw up national infrastructure.
We've had decades of fairly organised terrorism here in the UK, so perhaps I should know better, but it's a bit of a shock to realise that a 'manageable' quantity of otherwise fairly standard chemical stock is capable of producing something as dramatic as this.
The nitrates in question here apparently ended up in Lebanon after coming from Brazil via Mozambique.
If the reports are correct that the explosion is 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, the orange is probably nitrogen dioxide. A high concentration of nitrogen dioxide indicates that the explosion was very oxygen-rich, likely pointing to it being accidental.
Ammonium nitrate is normally very very stable. Even mixed optimally with fuel oil, ammonium nitrate prills (pellets) won't reliably detonate with a No. 8 blasting cap, and in mining a small "booster" charge of TNT is used to get the ANFO going. However, very large piles of ammonium nitrate have caught fire and exploded, such as the Texas City disaster where a tanker full of ammonium nitrate burned for a long time, and then levelled a good portion of the town when it exploded.
If one find it interesting one shouldn't flag it just because "we use to flag stuff like that".