Beirut explosion......

It at least appears to be a case of warehousing stuff without the proper precautions, based on the water vapor from the explosion and fireworks going off at least on the surface appears to be a relatively simple explanation as to what happened. It’s just hard to wrap your head around that much if it all exploding, I know from back in the day on the farm we used to blow up tree stumps, etc with it and it took very little and made a huge bang. A lot of innocent people lost their lives and thousands injured, displaced from homes, etc due to incompetence is a tragedy on so many levels.

 

Crossed? That was pole vaulting it, sticking the landing and sprinting deep into hostile territory!

 

Lot of images of the aftermath in this article...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...-rubble-bodies-death-toll-continues-rise.html

 

NOT IT!

 

Run Forest run

 

Holy sh&t, unreal the power of that explosion when you see the aftermath after the dust cleared. Having been to Hiroshima multiple times and touring various places the sheer devastation a bomb can do is mind boggling as an engineer. Not mind boggling as in I don’t understand it but just physically seeing the sheer radius of the devastation and power. Easy to look at a paper and the calculations of the force of a bomb but seeing it first hand is nuts. Even looking at the topographical map of Hiroshima and how they just rebuilt and the crater is still somewhat evident is eye opening. This was ~1/5th that size which is massive and hard to wrap your head around. Think if the force it takes to flip a car then think of that happening give or take a mile away from the blast, if not more. I’m sure the death toll is understated at the moment because sadly more than a few were disintegrated and until they match up the missing persons they won’t know. All of this because of what is believed to be pure incompetence. On our farm and by local laws certain types of fertilizer must be stored in fireproof areas with certain insulation so that if a fire was to happen around it it keeps it under a certain temp threshold. Storing this much in basically a generic warehouse is so incompetent is hard to even wonder what their lack of thinking was. Just from the aspect of not blowing up yourself let alone others would scare the shit out of me.

 

After the shockwave, you could see a RED mushroom cloud almost. Anyone know if that red smoke is an inidcation of ammonium nitrate or another chemical/reaction?

 

A few years ago there was a house across the lake from us that had a gas leak that resulted in the house exploding. We are miles across the lake from it. It rattled the house so hard it woke both of us out of a sound sleep. I can't even fathom how hard that hit people near it.

 

Googled that last night and couldn’t get a straight answer.

 

You can see in a few of the videos, some of the cars stopped to record the initial fire and when the explosion happened they disappeared.

 

There was a number of chemicals being stored at that location, and the large building adjacent to it was a huge cluster of grain silos. I would imagine there was a lot of different things burning that could have caused any number of strange looking smoke.

 

Makes sense. But during the popcorn explosions the smoke was light grey, it is after the massive explosion that it turned overwhelmingly red. Can't find any solid info on whether ammonium nitrate explosions are a specific color in general.

 

In one of the articles linked here a former CIA dude said no doubt that there were military grade munitions and propellant present going off in the fire and adding to the explosion etc.
So who knows what was all involved.

“He pointed to videos of what appeared to be fireworks going off amid a pall of white smoke, right before the main blast which sent a column of reddish-brown smoke high into the sky.

Baer told CNN that those 'fireworks' were likely munitions that had been stored as part of a weapons cache that included military-grade propellant.

'It was clearly a military explosive,' he said. 'It was not fertilizer like ammonium nitrate. I'm quite sure of that.' “

 

Wow. 5 pages and not a single "thoughts and prayers". Hmmmm...

 

? Every other comment includes some expression of compassion.

 

Probably no way to discuss this aspect of it here, but I am curious about the geopolitical blockages involved in sending humanitarian aid with the sanctions currently in place.

Yeah, that's probably not a safe topic. Nevermind.

 

Some before and after photos


https://twitter.com/Maxar/status/1291021268737765376?s=20

 

I would go with yes .. ( just a guess ) but there is another Ammonium Nitrate explosion on utube filmed at night and same , almost identical reddish plume from it

 

.. pretty sure saying never mind, is not going to save you