Beirut explosion......

The suggestion that it was a kinetic impactor from space is just plain dumb on so many levels. I won’t address most of them.

An object reentering the atmosphere and striking that location with the necessary energy would be recorded by so many sensor platforms that it would’ve been on CNN probably before it hit the surface. It’d be fucking unmistakeable. If you want 1-1 energy equivalency to TNT, the sucker has to hit near 3000 meters per second. That explosion looked to mass hundreds of tonnes. Meaning the object would have to be hundreds of tonnes, call it the mass of the International Space Station.

 

bingo

 

That’s what I’m asking. If this stuff was just lying around in bags and one or more reach that point, would the blast radius be different vs a contained explosive.
I would think that you would have varying degrees of destruction.
Unless the center is what went boom first.

 

I don’t know the source of these. I pulled them from Twitter.

 

My son was there a couple of times last year for work and he told me then that it was one of his favorite cities in the region.

So sad...

 

Look at the crator that thing left behind. That silo structure saved some of the buildingd behind it or I think everything to the roadway would be gone.

 

So I am supposed to believe that the owner of 3,000 tons of ammonium nit just "forgot" about it and left it at the port for a couple years?

 

Possibly stolen, owner paid off by insurance company years ago.

You might be surprised what is in warehouses long term, forgotten by their owners, only to be rediscovered after its value has diminished greatly.

Think about all these stupid "bard find" cars of late.

 

We would just add a fuel source and ignition so I can see it but damn.

 

Probably cheaper than having to get a boat repaired in Lebanon with all the red tape etc.

 

If they really just did have it in supersacks piled on top of each other then the weight of the sacks would act as the "containment". The explosion didnt necessarily start in the "center" but if you place ammonium nitrate pellets on the ground and light them they dont explode. When we made improvised explosives in the army using AM Nitrate we added some diesel fuel or melted paraffin wax and used TNT or other high explosive to detonate the Am nitrate. And even then we had small pellets blown out and not react. So it wasnt like a bottle rocket landed in there and the whole building exploded.

More like the fire next to it caused a fire in that building and eventually something got hot enough to go boom and it went.

If you read about some of the previous fires where this stuff went up...many times they fought the fire..sometimes for hours before it exploded (factories and ships).

One reason they use it in commercial/quarry blasting is its so safe and hard to detonate. They will fill bore holes with this stuff and add some dynamite/tnt/etc to ignite the Am nitrate charge.

 

Jives with what I've seen

 

A 50 lb bag of Nitrogen fertilizer on the ground, a quart of oil poured over it and an M80 to ignite it will blow a 30' crater...according to the Poor Man's James Bond.

If you could "contain" 2750 tons of explosive material, certainly it would make a bigger "pop". Just think about emptying the contents of a dynamite stick and tossing a lit match on it vs lighting the fuse of an intact stick. One goes "whoomph", the other goes "boom".
With the quantity(tons) and type of material(burn rate) in the Beirut blast, it effectively acted as it's own "soft" container.

Sensors did record it...3.3 on the Richter scale.
Coincidently, the alleged "Rods of God" do hit at that velocity on impact, Mach 10.
To think that an odd, scattered array of sensors could communicate with each other quickly enough to determine both the source and destination of an object whose starting point is traveling transversely in orbit at 25,000mph and impacting a fixed point at 6500mph, 1min and 25secs after launch, without being a dedicated array system designed specifically for that purpose is ludicrous, let alone would any "news" outlet have access to it in a timely fashion. Even if there were a system that could do it, it would have to be looking in the right place at the right time.
Using the factors I've previously presented, the kinetic energy of the impacting "rod" would be equivalent to ~28.5 billion Joules. I'll let someone else make a perspective comparison but I'd put it at ~7tons of TNT.

 

There are "systems" looking at every "hot spot" on the planet 7/24

 

I know I'm a dumbass, but would there not be some sort of visual/sonic indication? Vapor trail; sonic boom; flash etc.

 

"Barn find" of 3K t of stuff that builds bombs that also just happens to be smack dab in the stronghold of Hezbollah.

Nnnnnnnnaw

 

I've read it was off-loaded from a ship that was considered not seaworthy. So, not screaming 'care and prudence' here.

 

I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and say they built that grain elevator pretty fucking well.