Order of magnitude estimate of Beirut explosion at 3 kilotons of TNT

The other anomaly is the deep red smoke, that's something that seems unusual too (aside from storing so much fertilizer in such a built up area for so long). This is a disaster on so many levels, but then when is a disaster only caused by a single issue?

(I'm sure someone's thought about this idea before. Timothy McVeigh did his mad bombing with typical rural materiel. Not so fun fact: the VBIED predates the internal combustion engine.)

Let's outlaw cars and kitchen knives as well.

Oh and... guns? Outlaw guns in America? :) They can be dangerous too.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/08/04/politics/defense-official...

I’m not American, mind you, so I’m certainly biased because he’s mainly in our media when he does something stupid, but everything I have ever heard him say about Europe has been so far from the truth that it’s hard to take his word on anything.

Never again.

Looking at the videos of Tianjin disaster, there are multiple large explosions, each with a massive fireball, highly irregular, fiery projectiles flying everywhere etc.

The massive blast in Beirut was a singular event, with no preceding or subsequent blasts of similar magnitude. As if the ignition of the material was very efficient.

http://sites.science.oregonstate.edu/~restrepo/MTH481/Classn...

From videos:

R=450m

t=1.5s

rho=1.2kg/m3

E=9.84E12 kg.m2/s2 or 9.84E19 erg

Equiv TNT = 2.5kTonnes -TNT

Equiv AN = 5400 Tonnes

So double what current media is saying.

edit:formatting.

Two ships loading ammonium nitrate, the Grandcamp and the High Flyer, detonated in Texas City back in 1947.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster

It says there was a 15 ft wave out into the Gulf of Mexico that lasted for almost 100 miles.

And Texas City is not actually on the Gulf Coast, it is on Galveston Bay about a half hour away from the Gulf shore. And there is only a relatively narrow channel opening from the bay into the gulf.

There are ton-sized pieces of shrapnel still in a few places across the town.

I was stationed there in the early '80's when I was 20-something and everyone my age or older had parents & grandparents who had been through it, some surviving some not.

Now it's been twice as many decades and it's not as present, elements of recovery come into reach that are not possible the first few years or decades.

The cloud accompanying the big explosion has a very distinct red tint to it, indicating that it's a result of the ammonium nitrate going off. That before it doesn't, which suggests that the ammonium nitrate wasn't burning at the time. If you compare the Texas City disaster, it's noted that spectators were drawn towards the site by the unusual smoke clouds before the big explosion happened.

There's a lot of details that aren't clear yet, but a variety of materials being stored in a warehouse catching fire, with fireworks going off first and the ammonium nitrate going off last, is consistent with the known facts. It would, however, be exceptionally bad safety practices to store ammonium nitrate anywhere near something like fireworks. Then again, storing a large amount in a warehouse right next to downtown Beirut is itself insane, considering it has a history of being implicated in the largest explosions not involving nuclear weapons.

https://t.co/BRezMWT5IV

In the specific case of bulk ammonium nitrate, it has a low melting point (relative to a fire) and it starts to become quite unstable in that phase. The low risk of AN is premised on it being stored in a relatively clean, non-reactive environment.

Fuel oil generally isn’t considered a sensitizer for AN, you still need a booster, it compensates for the oxygen richness which improves efficiency. There are a bunch of nitrogen organics and metals, which I won’t list here, that will sensitize AN quite effectively but those aren’t implicated here.

Most fires with AN are caused by its reactivity. It will readily combine with other chemicals in the environment to produce compounds that are far more unstable than AN. These byproducts often act as the ignition point that ultimately causes the AN to detonate.

However, we know that the explosion wasn't stoichiometrically perfect, because of the brown NO2 clouds that were hanging over Beirut. Properly mixed ANFO should release only H2O, CO2, and N2. So we know that there was some level of explosive power that wasn't fully consumed. This is why I put the ANFO yield as the absolute theoretical max, I think in reality the actual yield was much much lower.

Some other people have speculated that the fireworks like mini explosions between the first and second big explosions was actually ammonium nitrate decomposing, which would imply that this was a pure ammonium nitrate explosion and not one accelerated by some sort of oil or other fuel. If that's true, various manufacturers give the AN to TNT equivalent of poorly handled AN at 15-40% of TNT, giving a yield somewhere in the 412-1,100 tonne range.

I do worry about the accuracy of this a bit, but looks like it could in theory work.

By the way with your data it looks like you get a better fit if you assume your first image is not at 50ms but rather 38 ms. A line fit between t and r^(5.2) gives a slope of 1.6 10^13. This gives 4 kt if you use the lower estimate of 1 kg/m^3 for the density of air.

I do worry you may have overestimated the distance slightly, as these numbers are frankly ridiculous, and with a power of 5 even small errors grow quickly.

Despite 2750T of ammonium nitrate the yield of explosion was around 0.2-0.3KT TNT

Then, you came to this HN post and described a bunch of people as "nerds" for trying to interpret the magnitude of the blast by observing what was captured on video.

The contrast between these two simultaneously held attitudes is so bizarre that I am chuckling to myself as I try to grasp your underlying thought process.

(You could easily have switched your approach to the two threads, criticizing the Intel i5-vs-i7 nerds while doing some napkin math to come up with your own estimate of the Beirut explosion in TNT terms.)

Have you ever gone to hairdresser, asked for a haircut, and the hairdresser only took one snip, and asked for money?

No, it doesn't happen. You know why, because people tend to justify their jobs.

I'm betting at least one of his Intel officers, would be suspicious of almost nuclear level yield blast.

This is real news. I expect it to be easy to see. Not a doomscrolling meaningless repeat of the C19 countdown for the day.

President Trump(And other world leaders) commented about 3 hours ago on this issue.

So the fact it's now made a headline is I guess your horse not mine.

And authorities do know what exploded, and have made statements. The initial fire is still uncertain.

This story was also on HN earlier and Flagged, because of complicated reasons, but it still probably shouldn't have been.

Where is this press release from the US Dept. of Defence? Or are you talking about the mysterious "three unnamed defence officials" CNN wrote about in an article?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYX9nyr7rng

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/defense-secretary-esper-con...