Explosion rocks Beirut, injuring thousands across Lebanese capital | Hacker News Reader

Explosion rocks Beirut, injuring thousands across Lebanese capital

cnn.com

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A reddit thread [1] collected 10 different angles of the explosion:

Angle 1: https://streamable.com/xmmoa7

Angle 2: https://streamable.com/nscx9m

Angle 3: https://streamable.com/zbjj5f

Angle 4: https://streamable.com/saoafz

Angle 5: https://streamable.com/4ga1vb

Angle 6: https://streamable.com/lmivb2

Angle 7: https://streamable.com/mcy82f

Angle 8: https://streamable.com/zg9oal

Angle 9: https://streamable.com/zykkj6

Angle 10: https://streamable.com/22e152

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/i3mb1v/large_bla...

It seems to have been confiscated ammonium nitrate. It had been in storage there since 2014.

The reddish brown smoke afterwards is certainly consistent with some sort of nitrate explosion. That's the color NOX usually is.

Might be the hindsight talking, but, it seems so reckless to store it in a city for so long. Do other port authorities do this?

The list of reckless things our leaders do seems to be endless. This isn't really surprising to me.

Every day I understand Musk's desire for Mars more. I hope I'll be able to get a ticket. I don't think Earth can survive the next 100 years without a serious change - and the "leaders" and other "elites" are trying their best to hold on to power.

It'll take much less recklessness tough, to take out a mars colony, once there is one. And a mars colony which can survive w/o regular support from earth is not even on the horizon.

Which could lead to elevated responses to recklessness that we are unable to get here on Earth. Same as with other kinds of death, the faster it is, the stronger the reaction, and vice versa.

There is conflicting report about the cause of the explosion. Some say the warehouse that caught fire was storing fireworks, others state the warehouse was storage for confiscated highly explosive materials.

The Footage of the explosion looks like what a layman like me would expect a low yield nuclear explosion to look like.

In any case, sad to see this happen.

It does not look like a low yield nuclear explosion.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHiihPD7bLM

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u3xywbrHS8 1:43 mark

Reminds me of thermobarics, but I don't know anything about anything.

This was a pretty huge explosion. It reminded me of the Thiokol rocket engine factory explosion in Henderson NV.

Given how visible the shockwave is in the videos, I would guess you could get a nominal estimate of the explosion energy by calculating shockwave volume over time. The video rate of the camera would give you time between measurements, and google maps could probably provide the building distances.

It was Pepcon[1], not Tiokol. And yes, the smoke has the same brown/orange color that you see with nitrate explosions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster

I'm seeing reports of it being recorded as a 3.5 magnitude earthquake which would be around 200 tons of TNT equivalent.

Locals have found news from few years back that says 2,750 tons of NOX. was confiscated and stored in the port.

Wow, if that pans out it would be exceptionally negligent to store that stuff like that.

One of the things about being a military brat was that I got to see a number of ammunition storage locations which are easily recognized by their subterranean reinforced bunkers separated by distance :-)

Feel bad for the Lebanese. Can’t catch a break.

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