Massive Blast in Lebanon

catsmate said:
Sigh, it has lot to do with it. AN is produced, moved and used on a vast scale. Most of that activity is entirely safe.


Yes, and without the fire (which had noting to do with the AN) there would have been no explosion.


As there are for flour, natural and other hydrocarbon gases, petroleum.....

If you take every significant (>1 tonne) AN accident in the past hundred years, and assume the Beirut death toll triples, you get the US road accident fatalities, for one average month.
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But we aren't talking about the chemical/material being handled safely. We are talking about a huge amount left in a warehouse next to the city for 5+ years despite being identified as a serious hazard.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
How can you tell what happened to the two people who went out on the balcony? We don't see them after the blast.
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We don't see the girl who strides out of shot to the left before the blast; some object gets hurled across the balcony heading to the right but I think it's something smaller than a person. In fact, looking again, theres something standing on the balcony just outside the door and that's what topples over.

The girl who remains just outside the door is still standing in the same spot after the blast wave passes (see still pic below) and then staggers to the right before dust obscures everything. She was making to move back into the room and it's possible the unfortunate girl was slammed against the door frame in the moment the wave hit but the camera doesn't capture it.

 
Steve said:
Nationa Fire Protection Association has a standard - NFPA 490 - regulating the storage of AN. Of course it then becomes up to the relevant authorities to adopt and enforce the standard. It is highly unlikely that this was done in the case at hand.
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Update to this. I have just learned that the NFPA has withdrawn NFPA 490 and incorporated AN storage requirements into the appendices of NFPA 400 Hazardous Materials Code. The requirements for AN have not materially changed.
 
Why even take it off the boat? Did the boat leave? Did they need it to be empty when it did?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
But we aren't talking about the chemical/material being handled safely. We are talking about a huge amount left in a warehouse next to the city for 5+ years despite being identified as a serious hazard.
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Correct. And that is a matter for the Lebanese authorities (and populace as this seems to have stirred things up) to sort out. It's not a time for knee-jerk "ammonium nitrate bad" reactions based on ignorance, fear and ignorant fear.
 
wobs said:
In the developed world it is heavily regulated, which is why it doesn't blow up more regularly.
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To a degree. It's generally quite safe.

wobs said:
If you set up a financial guarantee for a load (or a batch of loads), it shouldn't matter, as the authority can use that money to safely dispose of the material when such problems occur. That's the point of it.
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Such niceties were not part of the shipping operation in question.
 
Craig4 said:
This seems like a very important point. Perhaps it would have been better to not store the material next to all the explosives.
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That is generally considered a Good Thing by those of us who've dealt with hazmats.
 
Mike! said:
I'm no chemist, but I'll bet a mess of AM in the water wouldn't have been a good thing for a bunch of different reasons too.
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Meh, the stuff is fairly harmless, highly soluble in water it would have dissolved and been diluted quickly. It's not that toxic to fish or acquatics in general.
 
ohms said:
After being seized by the port authority in 2014, it was abandoned by the owner, the crew had were repatriated in 2015 and it then sank off the port of Beirut in 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhosus_(schip,_1986))
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I believe that, if you look in Google Maps, you can see the sunken ship.
At least. There's a light rectangular shade in the water, just about, where she was moored, according to the wiki page.
 
Mike! said:
In that case, it clearly would have been better to let it sink with the ship that was carrying it in the first place.
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Especially since, at the time when they took it off the ship, they had no reason to think the ship would sink anyway.
 
Ziggurat said:
Ammonium nitrate is a very good explosive.
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catsmate said:
No it's not.
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Perhaps some illustration would help on that point.

The scale of this explosion was in the range at which the biggest conventional/chemical bombs (bombs that explode by chemical reactions) get compared with small nukes. We've heard this kind of comparison before, in reference to a bomb called MOAB. That's not to say one MOAB would be enough to do what happened to Beirut, but it's close enough to say that just "a few" MOABs could do it.

It took over 27000 tons of ammonium nitrate. Each MOAB weighs under 11 tons (and that includes the metal shell).

Another example on a smaller scale: the terrorist attack on Oklahoma City used a 3½-ton bomb of mostly ammonium nitrate but with help from two other ingredients: a cleaning solvent (with a bit of explodiness as a side effect, like with the fertilizer) and an actual real-life explosive gel (engineered & used for exploding, and regulated that way). The latter would make up about 5% of the bomb. Even with the help of a 5% genuine explosive content and a bunch of blasting caps, it did about the level of damage that would be expected from a ½-ton or 1-ton air-dropped bomb.

So it's not a good explosive in the physical or chemical sense; it just becomes one in the practical sense for terrorists who can't get the real stuff because actual explosives tend to be regulated as explosives. (In fact, Oklahoma City is another example of that: the terrorists in that case tried to get their hands on something else that's really engineered & used & regulated for its ability to burn/explode, but couldn't because of regulations on selling that stuff.)
 
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