2020?

Texas City was two explosions from two different ships.    I think both were about the same size as the Beruit blast although they were staggered in time.

Fight flight or freeze.

 
   If you saw the initial blast and seen its size you could might react and lay flat or jump to a low spot.  

  You see smoke rings popping out of the blast you your about to have your hair blown back if you don't hit the dirt.    

Other than the flash, and radiation after-effects that's what a tiny nuke would look like.

How often do you practice experiencing a small nuclear blast?

Yeah in that vid you can really tell most people just have no clue how to react, the first one where its close and nearly instant you can understand how fast that happens. The 2nd one you have a split second of oh shit. And in the third one you can see the dude start to process and flinch away from it only to come back a second later. And I'm sure he survived even though you can see the building/him shake from it. Not sure on the first two.

Explosive decomposition of ammonium nitrate .  Same thing that happened in West, Texas .

I was surprised at how many people spoke English.

The most impressive footage IMO was the guy filming from a boat.... Could see the bubble, the wave through the buildings then coming across the water.

Taco Bell.  The burritos, man… whew.

That single incident caused the resignation of the Lebanese government and paved the way for the Hezbollah take over unfortunately.

Water doesn’t compress until extremely high pressures, even an explosion like that wouldn’t compress it.

The  brisance of an ammonium nitrate based explosion is a snails pace compared to military grade stuff

"duck" a shockwave?
How fast are we talking?

Internet says 1,400 to 1,600 meters per second (speed of sound is 343 m/s).  So it's supersonic but if you're far enough away you still could have enough time to react.  In some of the videos they had time to duck if they had realized what was happening.

N/m

I've seen Will Smith outrun dozens of explosions.

Would love to see a graph of particle velocity, and how it breaks down with distance as it goes transonic.

2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate
23 tons of fireworks
5 rolls of slow-burning detonation cord, and
1,000 vehicle tires

It was confiscated ammonium nitrate from a shipping vessel that sat at/in the pier warehouse in poor conditions for too long, and the primary fire ignited it.

Amazing footage, especially the coverage from so many angles.

It would be interesting to see how a ship laden with an explosive material order that was abandoned in port here would be handled.

The contents of the warehouse if even half true is beyond pants on head dumb.

Haven't seen that video and glad other people still remember and care about that blast.  There were a lot lessons that were learned and relearned from it.


A good source that also had the best information days before the normal news bothered to pick it up  is shipping/defense /energy (oil to wind farms)/piracy/ through more  sea& ocean  industry news website called GCaptain,

The Beirut explosion

https://gcaptain.com/tag/beirut-blast/ for all their articls and the photos. I added few hopefully the direct linking works.

Also IF you want to see where an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object https://gcaptain.com/category/accidents/ will show you how much  damage can be done  by large but slow moving masses on the site.  

Their email list is actual a good news source, no matter how you feel about covid, Gcaptain  noticed that all the normal shipping traffic just almost completely stopped from China , it was weeks/month plus  before their New Year's Holiday slow down. It was just so WTF? Something major was up there, but what..... What you'll see in the newsletter effects what you'll have the pumps and on the shelves in the stores in few months, so a good quick thing to skim for early warnings signs.  


Like this before after image from https://gcaptain.com/beirut-blast-blamed-on-chemical-cargo-removed-from-ship-in-2014/

A combination of satellite images shows the port of Beirut on June 9, 2020 and on August 5, 2020, after an explosion. Satellite image ?2020 Maxar Technologies/via REUTERS.








That little white ship rolled over in the above photo , across the port, zoomed in to help with scale



More photos and information about the ships in the port at the time  of that BIG Boom!

https://gcaptain.com/ais-data-shows-ships-in-port-at-time-of-beirut-explosion/

More articles and images , as mentioned above,
https://gcaptain.com/tag/beirut-blast/

The part that sucks even more Beirut was actually enjoying the first real peace period in decades and then this time bomb goes off.   Like fuck they can't catch a break....

The Orient Queen, 423ft long, for reference.

The "WTF is that?!" Lady was the best

plus its like watching a silent movie... no noise until the shock wave hits... NOBODY expects a 2 kiloton explosion from a fire

It doesn’t seem possible that it only killed 200 people.

It was killing people driving in their cars on a nearby highway... just from the over-pressure.

It was grain silos. Touched off by repair work with a torch that was in close proximity. the Silos had been full of grain for many years for a deal gone bad and working its way through their justice system. So lots of gas.