Stunning pictures of blast damage in Beirut

[catbyte]

Link to tweet

To help you understand the magnitude of what has happened in Beirut, consider this:

Lebanese officials say the explosion has left 300,000 people homeless. That would be the percentage equivalent of 14 million Americans losing their home in a single explosion.

[malaise]

1. I saw entire roads collapsed

Stunning destruction

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. Whoever built those grain silos did a good job. NT

[Disaffected]

10. Ah, grain silos:

They are typically constructed of strong interconnected concrete cylinders which would explain why the structure was not blown over.

I though at first it was a hotel or condo residence and was wondering how it survived.

[Kid Berwyn]

3. Warmongers n Greedheads have destroyed the "Paris of the Middle East"

From 2017:

From colony to couture, no other Middle Eastern city has proved itself to be a hub of art and fashion quite like Beirut. The fusion of East and West, of tradition and modernity, earned the Lebanese capital the nickname: The Paris of the Middle East. War-torn and tired, the people of Beirut show they can turn tragedy into cultural innovation.

https://theculturetrip.com/middle-east/lebanon/articles/why-beirut-was-once-called-the-paris-of-the-middle-east/

[soothsayer]

4. The crater is submerged to a diameter of 140m...

Link to tweet

?s=21

[jeffreyi]

5. Um, fireworks?

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Ammonium nitrate. Looks like a dockside storage facility.

Scarily similar to the Texas City disaster, except the fire apparently started in a warehouse, not a ship.

Ammonium nitrate is used principally as a fertilizer, but also as an explosive. It is relatively hard to cause it to detonate, so people get careless with it and store it without reasonable precautions. That's what happened in West, TX.

[ProfessorGAC]

8. Adding On

Ammonium nitrate is has the ability to detonate by releasing oxygen, hydrogen & nitrogen, at conveniently, a near ideal stoichiometry.
It is a commonly used industrial explosive.
Mixed with diesel or kerosene, it creates what's called a pushing explosive.
What this means, in a nutshell, is that explodes "slower" but releases a massive volume of gasses.
So, it creates a lot of force as air pressure moving only at under Mach 2. Moves a lot of stuff out of the way in the path of the blast wave.
Other very high explosives have a quality called brisance. This is basically a very fast, very powerful, thin blast wave.
These things propagate at Mach 10 or higher.
So, they knock thing down, but they pulverize instead of "moving".
That why they use the former in quarries. If they used other nitrated organic explosives, they would make nearly all gravel, and the thinner, faster shock wave would go for a couple miles. Windows would be at risk for a half mile!
It's a high explosive, and accidents have happened enough that Wikipedia has a page devoted to them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters

[Turbineguy]

7. Some background information on how the stuff got there

https://stableseas.org/blue-economy/explosion-beirut-seafarer-rights?fbclid=IwAR3cPtjrWsppc6X4Z0jMYfJSQ0woHmyFJw5ab-qJ8dY1UTuqflvT-JG9v2U

[Happy Hoosier]

9. As powerful as some tac nuke...

That‘s a heck of an explosion.