Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Wow, thats a huge explosion.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

To me, that looks like a flour dust explosion.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Looks like a Big Bang with accompanying pressure wave followed by Hezbollah saying, “Bugger there goes all our rockets”, And immediate denial of all knowledge from Israel.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Both my dad and I saw this and went "Fuff".

---------- Post added at 22:38 ---------- Previous post was at 22:12 ----------

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

That is an amazing, unbelievable, screw up.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Sadly the latest figures they have now are that there are 78 dead and more then 4,000 injured.:(

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-53659282

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Apparently the werehouse had 2,700 tons of Amonium Nitrate stored there that had been confiscated several uears earlier from a ship.

This chemical in its own right is not explosive ( It's an oxidising agent ) but if in combination with a flammable source, such as gas or oil, will facilitate an explosion.

From the pictures it looks like a fire was already in progress before the explosion so the flammable agent was there heating up the Nitrate.

See ANFO

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

Sky reporting someone was welding in the building

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

I can hear how that job offer went.
The good news is we have a new highly paid welding job for you. The bad news is that it's next to the biggest stack of ammonium nitrate in the Middle East!

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

The explosion is reported to be approximately 1/5 the size of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb and the largest in peacetime.

The devastation is unbelieveable.

The videos on-line seem to show a smaller initial explosion with red smoke just before the main blast.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

The sad thing is, the smaller explosion would have peaked peoples interest, perhaps have them stood at windows in nearby building looking to see what was happening, and then the big blast would have come.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

The 2015 Tianjin explosion in China was only 800 tons of AN, that stripped concrete balcony's off tower blocks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Tianjin_explosions

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

That stuff had only been sitting there for 6 or 7 years, what could possibly go wrong?

Unless there was some lengthy legality issue on ownership, you'd have thought they'd have sold most of it off by now (prospective buyers fully vetted ;) ) . . . or moved it away from such a highly populated area.

Re: Huge explosion in Lebanese capital, Beirut
 

There's only a split second between the small one and the main blast. It just looked interesting. There is some speculation that fireworks were also being stored in the warehouse so that could have been the smaller initial explosion with the red smoke.