that shock wave had a velocity of several kilometers per second...

The silo probably deflected some of the blast

There is a restaurant in downtown Allentown that serves delicious Middle Eastern food that I bought lunch from at least once or twice a week, but they have been closed for months due to the Wuhan virus. The owner is a wonderful and friendly woman from Lebanon, and her friendly and always smiling staff are of Lebanese descent as well.

I have not seen her in months nor have been in touch with her, but as I have a repeating reminder on my Outlook calendar that Wednesday is “Chile Day” (so good!) I thought of her and decided to send a short text asking about her and her family and when we could look forward to her restaurant re-opening.

Here is her reply -

“Good Morning Rob, it's great to hear from you.
Thank God we're all safe. I really miss seeing you. I don't know when I will be able to open since most of my customers still working from home. Yesterday news was so hard on us but Glory to God he kept my family safe. My sister, my cousins and my in law lost their houses to the explosion but thank God they're safe. One of my employees lost her first cousin. He's in his early 20 he's a firefighter. The world is a mess but God will always make a way sorry for my long text. Hope to see you soon. God Bless you.”

A ‘small world’ moment for sure.

The OK City bombing was 4,800 lbs or a little over 2 tons, right? This was 2,750 tons! Wow... It boggles the mind.

Talking about similar explosions, the Beruit blast bears some similarity to the PEPCON explosions in 1988. The big blast is at the 1 minute mark.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVpzjxRjPk

quote:

Originally posted by snwghst:
Ex- EOD friend replied with this when I asked him

“Guessing but A no crater on site, B pattern is fairly even at least from the views I could get, C the cloud has a very distinct reddish tinges. All told and given smaller explosion followed by larger one? torpex or some other moisture stabilized explosive based in the Amatol family. given the sheer amount of multiple country stuff that flows through Beirut? Torpex in this case may be older com block, Yugoslav, Chinese or Brit manufacture so the exact composition is hard to say and may have been a combination but I think without further evidence that is close.”

Somebody was looking out for this lady and the children in her care - they don't appear to have a scratch, after standing in front of a window.........

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=utKDE_1596651021

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold: ToYugoslav, Chinese or Brit manufacture so the exact composition is hard to say and may have been a combination but I think without further evidence that is close.”

The explosive was a knock-off copy of a knock-off copy of the real thing.

Quote - 'A photo posted by several accounts claimed to show this shipment in a warehouse at Beirut’s port, apparently stored in large sacks piled on top of each other. The image shows large sacks labelled “NITROPRILL”. NITROPRIL (with one L) is the trade name of a form of Ammonium Nitrate produced by Orica. Due to the slight difference in the spelling of the name, it is possible that the sacks seen in the photo are a knock off version. The only reference we could find to a product spelled this way was a Brazilian company called Nitro Prill Bombeamento de Explosivos.'


It is used by quarries as a low-explosive - much cheaper and 'gentler' than HE, and more akin to black powder in the way it lifts/pushes/heaves rather than destroys. A 'low' explosive, in other words, much favoured by the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, although they refined it somewhat, calling it RAN, rather than ANFO. I'll explain further if required but not in public.

For future reference, the UK is not in the business of making fake or knock-off replications of chemical products for anybody. If you can find an instance of that actually happening, I'd be very happy to learn of it.

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:
Somebody was looking out for this lady and the children in her care - they don't appear to have a scratch, after standing in front of a window.........

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=utKDE_1596651021

The woman who was vacuuming and snatched up the child and ran had very fast reflexes, especially compared to the woman in the second video.

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold:
Talking about similar explosions, the Beruit blast bears some similarity to the PEPCON explosions in 1988...

"Present that day were an estimated 4,500 tons of ammonium perchlorate, a powerful oxidizer found in solid fuel rocket boosters used for NASA space shuttles."

It is - or was - a common solid propellant for military rockets and missiles.

Complete article:

https://www.reviewjournal.com/...ed-las-vegas-valley/

30 years ago, massive PEPCON explosion rocked Las Vegas Valley

By Rio Lacanlale Las Vegas Review-Journal
May 2, 2018 - 6:41 am

Nearly 30 years ago, Pat Rose was driving to Lake Mead to spend the day out on the water with a friend when a large plume of smoke hovering over the PEPCON plant prompted him to pull over.

What happened next irrevocably changed his life.

Parked about 2,000 feet from the plant on Henderson’s Lake Mead Drive, he and his friend watched in awe as the smoke and flames grew.

Inside the burning industrial plant, company controller Roy Westerfield called 911. It was just before noon on May 4, 1988.

“We just had a big explosion, and everything’s on fire,” Westerfield, 62, told a dispatcher.

The event that shook the Las Vegas Valley would later be described — in a 2012 NASA case study — as the largest domestic, non-nuclear explosion in recorded history.

Westerfield and one other employee, Bruce Halker, didn’t make it out of the PEPCON plant alive. At least 370 others were injured.

Present that day were an estimated 4,500 tons of ammonium perchlorate, a powerful oxidizer found in solid fuel rocket boosters used for NASA space shuttles. PEPCON, which was located at what is now the junction of U.S. Highway 95 and the 215 Beltway in Henderson, was one of two major manufacturers of the oxidizer in the country at the time.

The initial fire, which set off three massive explosions that could be felt throughout the valley, erupted at about 11:30 a.m. During a standard repair, investigators learned, sparks from a welding torch ignited fiberglass material, and within minutes, the fire had spread at a rapid pace because of the stockpile of ammonium perchlorate.

Some 17 miles away at University Medical Center, Carol Rose, a nurse, was working on the fourth floor when the hospital began to shake. It would be more than four hours before she learned that her 22-year-old brother-in-law, Pat Rose, was severely injured in the blasts and was undergoing brain surgery next door at Valley Hospital Medical Center.

Two years earlier, the Challenger space shuttle had exploded mid-flight, prompting NASA to halt its exploration program. But PEPCON, an acronym for Pacific Engineering & Production Company of Nevada, continued to produce ammonium perchlorate, and the supply accumulated over the next 15 months.

That stockpile, along with poor housekeeping and storage practices, helped cause the explosions, Clark County Fire Department investigators later determined.

At the time of the blasts, PEPCON also had no formal evacuation plan and lacked an audible alarm system.

Instead, the first blast — the smallest of the three — acted as a warning to employees.

After the disaster, PEPCON was renamed Western Electrochemical Co. and relocated about 14 miles northwest of Cedar City, Utah. It is now called Amerian Pacific.

“When you get a chance to do it again, you implement things that you otherwise would not be able to do in an already-operating plant,” Chief Operating Officer Dave Thayer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in April, ahead of the 30th anniversary of the explosions. “You design it and build it so that it’s easier to maintain.”

Thayer was a processing engineer at the time, and one of the 75 surviving employees working the day of the explosions.

He said the biggest difference now is that the Southern Utah facility occupies about 150 acres, and the distance between buildings is at least 500 feet. The Henderson plant occupied less than 15 acres, Thayer said, and buildings were separated by fewer than 50 feet.

Hal Murdock, the company’s current president and CEO, added that unlike 30 years ago, the top company officials get out onto the plant as often as they can.

“This is a focus for both Dave and me,” he said. “We go out and assess how our folks are doing safety-wise in compliance with our procedures. And we’re pretty tough.”

In the aftermath of the explosions, Nevada enacted 46 regulations for handling ammonium perchlorate, and the 1991 Chemical Catastrophe Prevention Act set limits for chemical storage to prevent another disaster of that magnitude.

Far-reaching damage

The effects of the thunderous blasts were felt within a 10-mile radius of ground zero. The neighboring Kidd Marshmallow plant was demolished.

Shock waves destroyed buildings in their wake. Windows were shattered, walls were cracked and doors were broken. Property damage to surrounding businesses and homes was put at $74 million.

Two of the biggest blasts measured 3.0 and 3.5 on the Richter scale at observatories in California and Colorado, NASA found. Investigators even compared the explosion to a 1-kiloton air-blast nuclear detonation.

The fire burned out of control for the next five hours, and the smoke rose nearly 1,000 feet into the sky. It could be seen as far as 100 miles away, the Review-Journal reported at the time.

The other side of survival

Two months after the blasts, Pat Rose told the Review-Journal that the last thing he remembered before waking up in the hospital was pulling over to watch the massive fire.

He was the most severely injured in the blasts. The mammoth explosions hurled a boulder through the roof and windshield of his truck, leaving a gaping hole on the left side of his skull.

Before the blasts, Pat Rose loved being outdoors. His family said he was adventurous and strong. But after, his family said, he was never the same.

“You think somebody has survived and life is good, but there are so many other aspects of survival,” his oldest sister, Phyllis Rose, said in an April interview.

Her brother survived another 29 years. He died Sept. 27 at age 51, more than half a year before the 30th anniversary of the explosions that changed the course of his life.

He was never able to regain full mobility on the right side of his body, and speaking remained a challenge for him up until his death.

Because of his injuries, Pat Rose received the largest individual settlement. But it made him distrustful of people, his family said, and he never got married or had children.

She noted that her youngest brother led a private life afterward.

But 30 years after the blasts, even in death, his family said, Pat Rose found a way to leave his mark on the world. His entire estate will be donated to three local charities, supporting causes that were close to him.

“Having been a survivor and now turning around and passing it on, he’s a hero in his own way,” Phyllis Rose said.

Contact Rio Lacanlale at rlacanlale@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Follow @riolacanlale on Twitter.

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:
Somebody was looking out for this lady and the children in her care - they don't appear to have a scratch, after standing in front of a window.........

https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=utKDE_1596651021

Damn lucky they got the complete window panes blown in their faces rather than a hailstorm of shards, and some of the force also seems to have been caught by the curtains. The kid closest to the window seems to have bumped his head, but nothing more.

This picture adds some scale.

I was here (LV) during the Pepcon blast. My ex & I were in the NICU of Sunrise Hospital about ten miles away with our week old daughter. The NICU was below ground level in the hospital & it felt like an earthquake.

It's interesting to note that the Lebanese flag has been flying in Tel Aviv, Israel in a show of solidarity. As this article notes, Israel and Lebanon have been in a "technical state of war for generations."

I suspect 6-7 years of open exposure to the heat and humidity at the port did not help the stability of the ammonium nitrate.

For the record I didn't post the below info. The information on the potential sourse of knock off materials came from snwghst.

quote:

Originally posted by tacfoley:

quote:

Originally posted by SgtGold: ToYugoslav, Chinese or Brit manufacture so the exact composition is hard to say and may have been a combination but I think without further evidence that is close.”

The explosive was a knock-off copy of a knock-off copy of the real thing.

Quote - 'A photo posted by several accounts claimed to show this shipment in a warehouse at Beirut’s port, apparently stored in large sacks piled on top of each other. The image shows large sacks labelled “NITROPRILL”. NITROPRIL (with one L) is the trade name of a form of Ammonium Nitrate produced by Orica. Due to the slight difference in the spelling of the name, it is possible that the sacks seen in the photo are a knock off version. The only reference we could find to a product spelled this way was a Brazilian company called Nitro Prill Bombeamento de Explosivos.'


It is used by quarries as a low-explosive - much cheaper and 'gentler' than HE, and more akin to black powder in the way it lifts/pushes/heaves rather than destroys. A 'low' explosive, in other words, much favoured by the Provisional IRA in Northern Ireland, although they refined it somewhat, calling it RAN, rather than ANFO. I'll explain further if required but not in public.

For future reference, the UK is not in the business of making fake or knock-off replications of chemical products for anybody. If you can find an instance of that actually happening, I'd be very happy to learn of it.

While not nearly as bad, this reminds me of the Camp Minden, LA explosion in 2012.

EPA Report

Explo Officials Sentenced

quote:

Originally posted by 229DAK:
I suspect 6-7 years of open exposure to the heat and humidity at the port did not help the stability of the ammonium nitrate.

Actually the opposite. If fresh and dry, it is likely that it would have cooked off sooner in that fire. Any combustible contaminants that it may have acquired over the years could have sensitized it, though.

while not exactly Lebanon (although there is a huge Lebanese population in the city), my home town of Halifax had an explosion back in 1917 that was 2.9 kilotons of explosives from two ships - The Imo and the Mont Blanc

2000 killed and 9000 injured - the following day a blizzard set in

quote:

Originally posted by 229DAK:
While not nearly as bad, this reminds me of the Camp Minden, LA explosion in 2012.

EPA Report

Explo Officials Sentenced

A minor point of clarification... The unplanned explosions, as well as the emergency destructions of the waste propellant by Army EOD, at Camp Minden, the last in 2016, were exponentially smaller than the explosion in Beirut.

I’d go so far as to say collectively the Minden explosions of every kind were two orders of magnitude smaller.

i think these pics are from an Arab site




"Made in Georgia" (country, not U.S. state)

HD = High Density

RUSTAVI AZOT LLC

According to FMO website, Rustavi Azot LLC is the largest industrial enterprise in the country with 2300 employees. The Company is the primary fertilizer supplier to customers in Georgia and the Transcaucasian region, with an actual annual production capacity of up to 500,000 tons of ammonium nitrate (or 220,000 tons of ammonia) and 14,000 tons of sodium cyanide. In 2015 the Company generated 84 per cent of its sales from exports, making the Company one of the largest exporters in the Country.




each bag is a metric ton

Fertilizer? I'm not buying that.

I suspect a Hezbolla missile storage facility and associated rocket propellant and warheads.