Very slick method for comparing two images, but maybe the UX is a little obscure. I have to admit I thought it was two images side by side, and wondered why they were different proportions, until I noticed the handle.
The explosion is of course very similar to the 1947 Port Texas disaster (581 dead) But it also reminded me of the Halifax explosion of 1917 (2,000 dead).
In Halifax, the train dispatcher on the pier stayed at his post to send one last message to keep the next passenger train from entering town.
“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys”
It is common and intuitive, but the one thing that is unique is it is pretty much full frame. It is normally used on an image within the layout of the website. It took me a second to find the handle knowing it'd be there, but the sheer devastation kept my eye from finding it. The GP did not say it took them 20 minutes to find the handle obscure, but it does kind of get lost in the carnage.
It's the UI that the largest proportion of your target audience would find intuitive if they tried it.
So it's not the lack of an objective answer that's the problem, it's the difficulty of finding a proxy for your target audience and a testing process you can afford.
Sometimes the proxy is "you" and the testing is "your experience and intuition" and sometimes the proxy is a statistically significant number of formal user tests.
Nope, I was the same. I spent a good while wondering why the comparison images look like they are of different areas - and only then realized that you can use the middle bar to move, it was very obscure.
Another solution could be to make the date labels at the top look and act like buttons. Then you could still use the UI by clicking on the dates without having to understand the scrubber.
Kill Sticky kills tons of animations, many unexpectedly.
Ultimately, modern animations are just as distracting as animated Gifs were. They're somewhere between an ideal reading experience and wholly unwanted autoplay videos.
If autoplay videos are a swarm of angry hornets, animations are summertime gnats. We live with them but they're hardly something we asked for.
It's a standard UI design for comparing images on the web and is often used in online news websites when comparing "then" and "now" similar to the article
I've seen this UX for comparing images multiple times and it does seem rather standard, but I'm frequently stumped by the affordance for a few seconds. Maybe if it quickly slid over and back to show how to interact?
My first thought upon seeing the video was that Halifax must have felt a lot like that. My second was that the AZF explosion in Toulouse in 2001 was also ammonium nitrate. Obviously there are a painfully large number of other examples too.
I had a similar thought and slow reaction finding the slider, I expect "before and after" images to show me the full images side-by-side. After thinking about it I still think that's the better UX, my eyes can identify the same areas and switch back and forth more easily than I can drag my mouse back and forth over a slice. That it's apparently popular on news sites probably explains why I don't remember seeing this UX before (though I probably have), those few that I browse also get the most limited set of JS enabled.
the benefit of this is of course the images can be really big, so even if you have poor vision you can understand the difference. I would probably prefer a side by side and then a way to enter full view. I suppose that might actually be what happens, I would think this page was linked to from an article where you saw the both images side by side and had a compare link and then went to the posted view.
It would help a bit if ux wasn't so hostile to help-screens and help texts generally.
I get it that it is better when the ux is self-explanatory, but the second best option isn't to pretend everything-is-obvious-and-the-user-is-dumb, but to include a help screen or some pop over or in this case a text under the picture.
The source of the explosion is easy to identify by comparing it to these two videos[1][2]. You can see that a crescent-shaped area of the pier gets obliterated creating a water-filled crater in front of the silo (the building with 16 tall cylinders in a row). What's fascinating is that the flat buildings on the other side of the silo are obliterated as well. From the two videos below, it looks like the shockwave wraps around the silo and destroys stuff on the far side.
Tom Scott did a video about another acoustic lens: the "sound mirror" overlooking the English Channel that was intended to be an early warning against aircraft coming from the continent.
85% of the Lebanese annual grain reserves. If they can recover any from the spoil heap it may help save starvation because without a silo complex, where are they going to store the grain for the rest of the years bread?
July 1921: “workers tried to dislodge 30 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that had aggregated (solidified into one mass) in two wagons. When mining explosives were used on this solid mass the wagons exploded”
September 1921: “Another attempt at disaggregation of a fertilizer mix with industrial explosives caused the death of 561 people”
April, 1942: “An attempt to disaggregate a pile of 150 tonnes of ammonium nitrate with industrial explosives killed 189 people“
Three different locations, but one would think they would have heard of those earlier blasts.
I don't think it was common in the 1920s however. There was the 30s + Depression era, which could have resulted in losing some knowledge by the 40s as workers shifted jobs.
The ship on its side to the north of the blast -- I wonder what kind of damage was able to cause that? (i.e. the ship not be able to roll back upright? Seeing footage elsewhere, rolling even to the point of ~45-60 deg is not fatal to an oceangoing container ship)
Windows blown out, then force of the overpressure rolling it on its side, then filling with water? Or unsecured load (being in port) shifting and sinking?
Separately, about the chemicals -- at some point, over 6 years, doesn't someone just say, I'm moving this life threatening shit out of here, go ahead and arrest me? After the Tianjin disaster, wouldn't someone have thought of that, you would think?
The ship is a cruise ship, the Orient Queen. Shout out to the brilliant Marine Traffic app where I found this first, but it's also written about on some industry websites.
The consensus seems to be that that the hull was damaged and water flooded the ship on one side, causing it to list and then sink.
> After the Tianjin disaster, wouldn't someone have thought of that, you would think?
There's a string of similar disasters reaching back about a century, and unfortunately not everyone seems to take note. There was a big one in Texas just two years before the Tianjin one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
Never underestimate the power of bureaucratic paralysis... From all news reports it's looking like the persons responsible for the port repeatedly pleaded with the Lebanese court authorities to get it out of there, and nothing was ever done.
I honestly have no idea how admiralty law works in a Lebanese legal context. In the US or Canada if a ship is abandoned in port there's well defined legal mechanisms for the port authority to seize it and its cargo for unpaid fuel and moorage fees, and summon the owners to court to defend their asset.
The owner is a Russian Cypriot who abdicated responsibility. They weren't able to locate him.
Four crew members of the vessel got stranded onboard for a whole year while the issue was being resolved. They were not allowed to disembark nor return home.
Afterwards this stuff was improperly stored in a warehouse for six years. There's lots of corruption and incompetence at every stage of this.
The twist not in the news is the alternative uses this substance has and what else was incompetently stored in the vicinity. It really isn't a big mystery why so many tons of it were left for such a long time in that port.
Seems like for a hazardous commodity like ammonium nitrite after some reasonable period of time the port authorities should be able sell it and put the money in escrow.
Not clear what the "red mercury" article has to do with the Beirut incident, but fortunately, it turned out to be either a hoax, a fraud, an intelligence-agency sting of some kind, or just plain kookery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
> ... at some point, over 6 years, doesn't someone just say ...
A very small comfort indeed, but now that it's in the public attention expect every other port around the world to quickly review and relocate any ersatz munitions on their docks.
Newcastle, Australia has a port facility storing between 6,000 and 12,000 tons of AN close to residential areas. Unfortunately despite calls for it to reduce the stockpile or move it elsewhere, it seems not much is being done.
"Storing" needs some context here I think. It's a factory producing 385kt of AN a year, so 6-12kt is approx a week's worth of production. I don't really see how you can avoid needing that kind of buffer storage at that scale, and by all reports they're following strict safety standards.
That said, that makes the real question why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.
Finally my military experience is relevant. If you've ever wondered why military ammo depots rarely blow up despite plenty of accidents and fires (at least in western cultures or specifically in the USA), a long time ago I was an Army sysadmin for a computer system devoted to keeping that safe. This wasn't a centralized control thing either, it was a distributed system.
There's a minimum contact diameter and maximum distance to propagate an explosion. Even if you detonate one pallet of one ton of ANFO literally making a checkerboard of pallets would seem from memory to be enough to make sure the explosion does not propagate to the other pallets. Now realize this was decades ago and I was more or less a sysadmin not a warrant officer nor one of the research scientists who wrote the books full of regulations nor the geospatial analysis code. Yes one pallet of one ton of ANFO would make a mess of the forklift driver next to it, but, maybe 100 or 200 hundred feet away, other than maybe some broken windows you'd be hard pressed to tell it happened.
One of many AN production processes generates about one part calcium carbonate (limestone, essentially) to one part AN, so you could literally alternate train cars of synthetic limestone with train car loads of AN.
Bulk storage is more problematic.
A pretty good analogy is forest fires. One tree chopped into segments and catches fire is a pretty cool bonfire or camp fire which is no big deal for outdoorsmen who intelligently plan ahead. You can do that a million nights in a row and nothing bad will happen. One million trees in close proximity and if one catches fire the whole forest burns down in one night, which is a huge problem.
> why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.
I don't know about this specific case, but the chronology is usually reversed. Someone gets a permit and builds a hazardous factory somewhere suitably close to a city that it has access to transportation and employees, but far enough to be safe, with adequate safety areas. Then, over time, the city needs more room and since the factory hasn't blown up yet, it seems safe enough to expand right up to it...
> by all reports they're following strict safety standards.
Orica has been fined for safety breaches in the past. But even if they are doing everything right, you need to consider the context: it's surrounded by a bunch of things that can catch fire.
There's a massive coal terminal, a fuel/petrol terminal, as well as a Fertiliser producer all within a few hundred meters of each other.
Any one of those having a bad day and Newcastle makes state news and everyone goes to watch the fire. (Like seemingly half the country did when the Pasha Bulker freighter beached right on Nobby's Beach, a few hundred meters away).
If that fire spreads, because say there's strong winds (also a common thing there) and now we have a risk of Orica's terminal going up.
Orica plant was commenced in 1969 -- I wonder what distance the nearest residential housing was to the site at the time.
I can understand residents not wanting to be within a potential blast radius, but I don't know enough to guess at who'd be responsible for the cost of relocating a manufacturing plant if there was council approval to extend suburban zoning ever closer to the plant over the years.
Same thing for the AZF disaster in Toulouse, France: when the plant was created it was in the middle of fields.
Fast forward in time and the surroundings of the plant became completely urbanized at the time of the explosion.
I remember my physics teacher talking about the AZF plant risk and urbanization circa 1990 so twenty years before the explosion (I'm from the Toulouse area), so everyone knew there too.
I have family that used to own property in Stockton well before the Stockton Bridge was built in 1971.
According to Wikipedia "Stockton was settled almost as soon as the foundation of Newcastle in 1797." -- so yeah, the Orica plant was definitely established well after people were living there. It's grown a bit since, but it's definitely still very much a 'beach town vibe'.
Then of course there's the whole City of Newcastle right across the harbour. While the 1989 earthquake definitely resulted in the city hollowing out, when the Orica plant was built it was a vibrant and well populated.
I'm about 130km north-west of Newcastle now, so relatively safe from any immediate effects.
In Sydney, under the Mascot (main international airport) flight paths, you've got people who purchased property in the last couple of decades insisting that curfew hours be increased, flight paths be changed, etc -- despite the airport operating for 80+ years, and at no time in the past century has anyone thought air travel would decrease in popularity (2020 notwithstanding).
I get that some people buy into areas expecting change / no change, but I'm very wary of people's causality inversion fields getting in the way of historical accuracy.
If Orica's been there for 51 years now, how many local residents turned up since they 1969 vs after 1969?
If you look at where the building holding the explosives was, it's a now filled with water and connected to the ocean.
I'm wondering if it was a tsunami that flipped the ship over? Haven't heard any reports of a tsunami, but you could imagine if that much dirt was blasted out into the water, it probably created a substantial wave.
yeah...was just wondering which port is ever going to seize and store chemicals like that now. Probably no one wanted to touch it and it just got stuck there.
Hezbollah is known to stockpile around this amount of explosives. One stockpile was discovered in London in 2015, and another was discovered in Germany.
Ammonium nitrate is a popular readily available ingredient for many militant groups that want to improvise a bomb. The Oklahoma City bomb was ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel or heavy fuel oil. Not like this is something exclusive to Hezbollah. In this particular case the instance of the ship and its cargo that were abandoned at the port in 2014 are well documented and no significant links to Hezbollah have been documented yet.
Anyways, if Hebzollah wanted the ammonium nitrate for their own use, surely they would have found a way some time in the past five years to remove it from the port in 1 to 5 ton quantities and store it somewhere in more rural areas outside of metro Beirut.
I mean, just the fact that this stuff was stored out in the open .. and 'everyone knew' it was there. That is just a major security risk.
Its not like Lebanon doesn't have enemies, who would have benefited greatly from this incident.
If it weren't so tragic, the stupidity would be hilarious. 2700+ tons of explosive material, parked right in the most strategic spot, in a city well known for having enemies ...
> Anyways, if Hebzollah wanted the ammonium nitrate for their own use, surely they would have found a way some time in the past five years to remove it
They did find a way -
"Lebanon's LBCI-TV reported on August 5 that, according to preliminary information, the fire that set off the explosion was started accidentally by welders who were closing off a gap that allowed unauthorized entry into the warehouse."
A Lebanese friend told me of a link. This explosion came 3 days before the UN tribunal's verdict on the murder of the former prime minister Hariri in 2005. "Everyone knows" the port is controlled by the Amal party, who is allied with Hezbollah. That party is led by Nabih Berri, who has been Speaker of Parliament since 1992, and who fought the formation of the tribunal in 2007. And anyway, just several hours ago, the UN has announced it is delaying its verdicts on the assassination trial until the 18th. We'll see how that goes.
Well, it could also just be an accident likely due to negligence/incompetence. The port probably wasn't run to the highest standards before the coronavirus, and the ongoing primary and secondary crises from that may have just been the final blow needed for something bad to happen.
Firstly, its a terrible explosive for actual military use. If you can pull strings on this scale, you can obtain something more practical.
If you are planning terrorist attacks, you don't need a mountain of the stuff, because there is no plausible scenario for using it in such quantities.
Secondly, if they had a plan to use it, they would have moved it somewhere sensible, and have it guarded / stored properly, they would make sure its not lost in a terrible accident.
Maybe someone who knows about how shipping works can explain why they thought it was a good idea to keep a huge amount of ammonium nitrate in the port? Why not keep the ship offshore somewhere, or in some harbour that isn't in a metropolis?
Unlike a lot of explosives, ammonium nitrate doesn't go off in anything goes wrong; it requires a few things to go wrong at the same time. Thus, storing huge amounts of it is safe enough for lots of people to do it, and consequently for those large storage amounts to litter the list of largest explosions.
Another common feature of ammonium nitrate explosions is how the procedures they were following didn't cause any problems the last several times they followed it. The Oppau explosion, for example, found that dynamiting their ammonium nitrate/ammonium sulfate mixture to loosen it caused a massive explosion that didn't occur the previous 30,000 times they did it.
Part of the problem with Oppau was that they were dynamiting a 50/50 mixture of ammonium nitrate and ammonium sulfate, which they thought was safe. It turned out that dynamiting such a mixture isn't safe after all.
and it seems they actually knew it. from wikipedia "Two months earlier, at Kriewald, then part of Germany, 19 people had died when 30 tonnes of ammonium nitrate detonated under similar circumstances. It is not clear why this warning was not heeded"
The nitrate was seized from an African ship in 2013 and had been in storage ever since. Beirut Customs made multiple attempts to get it re-exported, but for some reason no one in government took action.
Not an African ship, Russian/Ukrainian owned through a shell company in Cyprus, exporting ammonium nitrate from Georgia to a destination in Mozambique. Shipping company went belly up and stranded the crew and ship in Beirut in 2014, the crew eventually went home and left the ship behind for the Lebanese government to deal with.
This isn't some sort of obscure conspiracy theory, all of what the GP said was and is being very widely reported on. The name of the ship is the Rhosus.
Given the exact phrasing of the GP (cities/countries, route of ship) it is important to provide sources.
I genuinely had no idea and wanted to learn more. This indicates to me that it is perhaps not common knowledge as you claim.
I agree that I should have perhaps written a more detailed response requesting sources in a different way, especially if you're comparing my understanding to conspiracy theories.
CNN article linked in same thread. Extensive media reports from 2014 in Russian/Ukrainian media when the ship was seized. It was a minor human interest story because the crew was stranded for 10+ months with no operating funds and no salary.
I disagree for two reasons: 1. If you're making bold claims then you should ideally back them up (wouldn't the internet be better this way?); And 2. If you've done "research" then part of that would entail sharing your "findings" i.e. providing sources.
It's not about being lazy, it's about wanting a better internet experience. Making claims without backing them up doesn't sit well with me.
> Various customs officials had sent letters to judges requesting a resolution to the issue of the confiscated cargo, proposing that the ammonium nitrate either be exported, given to the Lebanese army, or sold to the private Lebanese Explosives Company.[e][14] Letters had been sent on 27 June and 5 December 2014, 6 May 2015, 20 May and 13 October 2016, and 27 October 2017.[14] One of the letters sent in 2016 noted that judges had not replied to previous requests, and "pleaded":[14]
>> In view of the serious danger of keeping these goods in the hangar in unsuitable climatic conditions, we reaffirm our request to please request the marine agency to re-export these goods immediately to preserve the safety of the port and those working in it, or to look into agreeing to sell this amount
Its hygroscopic, stored next to the water, in a poor country. It was likely unsellable within weeks. Or, to be blunt, every undamaged package was probably already sold within weeks. Once the remainder amalgamates into a giant lump, its an environmental remediation problem that'll cost money, not a make money fast sales scam. That's the whole point of why historically explosives were used to crack chunks apart.
There are apparently photos and videos of the confiscated ammonium nitrate, in forklift-size bags, in video from Ukrainian media in 2014 when the ship was abandoned in Beirut.
Typically ammonium nitrate needs some type of fuel to detonate. In the Texas City explosion there was ample hydrocarbons in direct contact with the AN to support the reaction. I’m curious if there is any speculation what provided the fuel in this case. Maybe they were coated prills?
Ammonium nitrate does not require fuel to detonate. Even if you add heavy diesel, you will still be need to use the same boosters (usually PETN) that you would use for pure ammonium nitrate to achieve reliable detonation. Ammonium nitrate has a positive stoichiometric oxygen balance when it detonates so it is typically mixed with chemicals with a negative oxygen balance (such as heavy diesel) to inexpensively improve explosive performance. It has nothing to do with making it detonate.
While ammonium nitrate is quite difficult to detonate at room temperature, it becomes considerably less stable as it approaches its melting point, which is relatively low. Sensitivity can also be increased chemically but that requires significant effort and intent.
In a lot of videos you can see a fire next to the storage facility. It was also a very hot day. So most people believe the temperature in the storage raised enough to make the ammonium nitrate unstable.
Wow, for some reason I always thought if it as a pure oxidizer (obviously not a chemistry expert here) and had no idea that it could detonate on its own. Great info, thank you!!!
Ammonium nitrate is a high explosive all on it's own, but not a very good one. It's a very insensitive explosive and tends to absorb water from the atmosphere, so fuel oil is added to make it a more efficient and stable explosive.
It’s interesting to note how much the grain silos changed the shape of the blast. The damage behind the silos is almost immediately reduced, even in this set of images.
Grain silos are actually built to withstand explosions. I am not an expert but I was explained as a kid that stored grain can create static electricity discharges that can result in self-ignition.
Wow, after reading your comment I started digging a bit and found this video from 2014. Those small explosions in the grain elevator look very similar to the explosions that happened before the big one in Beirut:
Grain elevators (which that building is) can undergo fairly extreme loading so they are constructed from thick, steel-reinforced concrete. Depending on the details, the walls can be a substantial fraction of a meter in thickness. Additionally, there was tens of meters of standoff distance between the explosive and the grain elevators, which significantly reduces the peak stress it needs to endure.
Due to the height of the grain column, they are designed to withstand enormous pressures induced by having extremely tall columns of grain concurrent with undergoing lateral stresses from typhoon/tornado velocity winds. While they are not designed to be resistant to the shock wave characteristic of large detonations per se, being built with so much reinforced concrete lends some of that property naturally.
The warehouses that were obliterated entirely, if I had to guess they were steel truss with corrugated steel skins. One of the lowest cost ways to cover the largest area in square meters possible. Basically large versions of these steel truss horse barns, see interior photo:
> Is it really that easy to build a building that can handle explosions like this?
It's probably not that hard to have some sort of structural parts still standing but these things are as good as destroyed (even worse because now they'll have to setup a controlled demolition on a potentially unstable structure).
A good 50% of the silos aren't there anymore, I guess the enormous amount of grain inside absorbed and dissipated a lot of the blast. They're basically the building equivalent of sandbags.
I read somewhere that the way the harbour and the storage buildings where structured(probably not intentionally) directed a big part oft the blast downwards, hence the crater. Matches the Videos i've seen were the explosion was sharply going into the sky. Only the shockwave was horizontal.
Purely from a physics/explosives effectiveness standpoint, the destruction would have been much greater if it had occurred at 200-300m above ground level. This is one of the reasons why air drop freefall nuclear bombs (10-20 kiloton class) were designed with radar fuses to explode at a certain height above the target, and not at ground level. Except when intended to destroy a bunker.
Because the explosion occurred at ground level at least some of its energy was directed into excavating a crater and not destructive shockwave traveling outwards.
One can think of an explosion causing a roughly spherical shockwave. For a ground level explosion there's a relatively narrow "band" of that shockwave that travels along the surface of the earth damaging buildings and other stuff, the rest is either directed upwards, or as you say, to create a crater (and a lot of the "cratering energy" will be reflected upwards towards the sky as well).
A ground level explosion also means that nearby buildings and geography (hills etc.) shield things behind them, reducing the destructive effect.
With an airburst you have a more even distribution of destructive energy over a larger area.
1. Strategic -- The world is going to die nukes. These are big nukes on ICBMs. If the opponent launches a strategic nuke, you launch all of yours and kill them too.
2. Tactical -- Small nukes that you shoot at the opponent's army before sending in your troops.
You're thinking of strategic nukes. But strategic nukes are far weaker if you have a dirty explosion: its probably better to have a more complete bomb. Tactical nukes absolutely must be clean, because your own troops are in the area.
Strategic nukes are typically fission-fusion-fission devices with both more yield and more fallout than a cleaner fission-fusion design of the same weight.
One of the videos, when you step it frame by frame, manages to capture a nearly spherical fireball [1]. The next frame seems to suggest (to my amateur eyes) that the tall grain silos is causing a bit of a reflection of the fireball. Other than the grain silos, though, there doesn't seem to be any other factors shaping the blast.
Reinforced walls, no windows, angled inwards in a truncated pyramid to deflect energy up. Maybe covering it with material that's expected to be blown away by an explosion is a good idea as well. If it's grassy it may even help to keep the building cool.
I doubt that when someone is designing a storage warehouse on a shipping pier that "deflecting explosion energy" is very high on the list. "How cheap can we cover the most square footage" (is square meterage a word) would be the #1 question.
Also in an area where you don't have to design for roof snow loading, risk of tornadoes or hurricanes, warehouse structures on a concrete slab can be built at lower cost, with lighter gauge material and less structural reinforcement.
Yeah, I'm surprised all the office or apartment buildings across the street seem to all be intact. Hope the people that were in those buildings are all right.
Lebanon and the Lebanese are like the Phoenix... They will rise again. The story here is one of incompetence and corruption beyond comprehension. It's the culmination of years of angst amongst the population. I hope this is a turning point for a city that was once the Paris of the middle East.
Lebanon also has problems with cousin marriage - leading to lower IQ and birth defects in the next generation. 17% of Lebanese Christians and 30% of Lebanese Muslims marry their first cousins.
The two smaller ships that are moored directly next to the warehouse... I wonder if they were there at the time of the explosion and are now in tiny steel shards scattered over a several km area, or if those moorage locations were vacant at the time.
Where does the ship all the way on the left in the after picture come from? I'm assuming it was moved there from somewhere, but if so it looks to me like there is an extra ship. (this isn't a paranoia thing I have difficulties understanding spatial relations so I assume all the ships were moved from various places by explosion but I just can't follow it)
Interesting that most of the visible damage seems to be confined to the area west of the highway irrespective of distance from the epicenter - is that just because warehouses are constructed differently to the commercial/residential buildings of the downtown area?
> Lebanon's prime minister said an investigation would focus on an estimated 2,750 metric tons of the explosive ammonium nitrate stored at a warehouse.
> A security source said the explosive power of the stored ammonium nitrate was equivalent to at least 1,200 tonnes of TNT
So we are basically looking at a 1kt nuke blast (minus the heat and fallout). Hiroshima nuke, for scale, was at 13–18kt.
And that's minuscule compared to the active arsenal held by United States and Russia. Their weapons are in the 400-1200kt range, and both nations have thousands of them.
Imagine several million of the Beirut explosions happening simultaneously in densely populated cities, and look at the men who hold the launch codes for these weapons.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists maintains a "Doomsday Clock" which is currently closer than ever to midnight — and they started in 1947.
For a bomb that size the kill radius from prompt neutrons is several times that of the blast. Buildings across the street were intact even though we saw bits of their facades coming off as the blast it. Probably most people across the street survived but probably wouldn't if it was a nuke.
If it were a nuke it would have gotten bright very quickly, but it quickly would be obscured by clouds and dust.
Well, yes, though a nuke would not detonate at ground level which would make it more destructive for most purposes (apart from bunker destruction). Plus 1kt is very very small for a nuke.
Is there any reason a nuke could not detonate at ground level? Or are you saying to inflict the most damage, you "would not/should not" detonate a nuke at ground level.
They would not detonate at ground level to maximize destructive potential. To contrast, the US actually has different bombs that penetrate into the ground before detonating in order to effectively destroy buried bunkers.
For example, I believe the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonated at about 500m above the ground.
> It was also intended that the munition could be used against targets in coastal and near-coastal locations. One person carrying the weapon package would parachute from an aircraft and place the device in a harbor or other strategic location that was accessible from the sea. Another parachutist without a weapon package would follow the first to provide support as needed. The two-man team would place the weapon package in the target location, set the timer, and swim out into the ocean, where they would be retrieved by a submarine or a high-speed surface water craft.
> Satellite images comparing the area before and after the explosion show the complete destruction of Beirut's port. The grain silos that were next to the site of the explosion are still partially upright, although it's believed that up to 85 percent of the country's grain stocks have been lost. (Lebanon imports 80 percent of its food supply, and Beirut normally handles 60 percent of the country's total imports.)
It's a grain silo. It seems it was full. In any case, the cylindrical walls should withstand a lot of punishment before collapsing. It also seems the first row of siloes was destroyed.
Bottom middle of picture just above the silos - circular shape has been carved out of the dock. I note the ship across the harbour has been tipped over too.
That space where there's a hole in the port is probably where the explosion happened. Also looks like the two ships nearby got vaporized. Frightening sight
It looks like one is moored around the corner and the smaller one is possibly that wreckage on shore north of its previous location. How that's possible I have no idea.
It's reasonable that they avoided auctioning the massive amounts of ammonium nitrate because it's useful for bombs (Hezbollah being the strongest force in the government). If that's the case, as the would be target of these bombs, I'm happy it blew up. I'm very sorry for innocent lives lost and for Lebanon in general. I wish they would wise up and join Israel in making the region livable.
I said something more nuanced, but It's very natural not to want to be bombed. Israel is mostly busy being a normal livable country for all it's residents. unlike its neighbors.
Meanwhile Reddit decided that today would be a good day to make /r/ShockwavePorn a trending subreddit.
What would've their response been if this happened in a European country? Using the pain of thousands of people to push a "cool" subreddit is just bad taste.
I always think reddit is full of immature kids, bored "IQ" teens and old idiots. Those "trends" (which do not exceed 50k people on average) include the 3 mentioned categories
> What would've their response been if this happened in a European country?
I think's it's human to initially dehumanise people who are different but what's sad is when you point it out people just double down and insist it's ok.
The explosion is of course very similar to the 1947 Port Texas disaster (581 dead) But it also reminded me of the Halifax explosion of 1917 (2,000 dead).
In Halifax, the train dispatcher on the pier stayed at his post to send one last message to keep the next passenger train from entering town.
“Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys”