Massive blast in Beirut

Seems odd for it to be an attack from Israel. A bomb would have blown it up, but not had a fire going on for a while before hand.
 
Unseul said:
Seems odd for it to be an attack from Israel. A bomb would have blown it up, but not had a fire going on for a while before hand.
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Probably not an attack from Israel but they've targetted weapon storage/movement in this kind of context a bit recently. A bomb can leave stuff burning causing a bigger incident.
 
kindai said:
"The streets of East Beirut lay in apocalyptic ruin even four kilometres from the epicentre of the blast. Every building in between had lost some if not all of its windows. Huge shards of glass covered roads, some jagged pieces had ripped through cars. Trees were shredded, and pools of blood were commonplace. Blood trails lead to cars, and motorbikes that had sped the injured away to clinics or hospitals that could not cope with the dead and maimed."
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4KM is a huuuge damage radius, you need to playing about with 15/20kt bombs on 'Nukemap' to get that sort of damage radius from a surface explosion.

(Well aware Nukemap is hardly the end word in scientific analysis but still)

That can't be right can it?
 
Rroff said:
Probably not an attack from Israel but they've targetted weapon storage/movement in this kind of context a bit recently. A bomb can leave stuff burning causing a bigger incident.
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They've targeted them yes, but if they've decided to destroy it, I don't think they'd just start a fire with a plan that it'll take the rest out, leaves it to chance.
 
Kenai said:
4KM is a huuuge damage radius, you need to playing about with 15/20kt bombs on 'Nukemap' to get that sort of damage radius from a surface explosion.

(Well aware Nukemap is hardly the end word in scientific analysis but still)

That can't be right can it?
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You have to look at the scale of the damage as well - the damage done by a nuke in a 4KM radius will flatten most things - this just did serious damage.

Zefan said:
Awful, looks like a mini nuke went off. In my completely not expert opinion, that can surely only be some variation of a fuel air bomb.
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Scary thing is this is 1000x less power than even a small nuke - somewhere in the region of 15-18 tons of TNT equivalent versus 20K tons for a small nuke.
 
People in Cyprus reporting they could hear/feel the blast.

Seeing a few people mention Sodium Nitrate was being stored there after being confiscated from a ship.
 
Rroff said:
You have to look at the scale of the damage as well - the damage done by a nuke in a 4KM radius will flatten most things - this just did serious damage.
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That 15/20kt number was what you need to stick in the site to get 'windows blown out' at 4km

Where have you seen 18t TNT equiv. quoted? That seems the opposite, too small

Presumably as a novelty site Nukemap can't be expected to be accurate but I figured it wasn't out by a factor of a thousand or so
 
Kenai said:
That 15/20kt number was what you need to stick in the site to get 'windows blown out' at 4km

Where have you seen 18t TNT equiv. quoted? That seems the opposite, too small
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Estimate based on scale of the explosion compared to known TNT equivalent ones.
 
antijoke said:
Not a fireworks factory...
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The first of those tweets claims Al Jazeera as a source, but that claim is not currently been aired by Al Jazeera (at least on the English language version) - the "confiscated for years" part, that is.

Edit: it's appeared now
 
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Christ that’s some blast, the footage of it is bleak to say the least. Fireworks factory, viable for an explosion that large? Hard to believe but I’m no fireworks expert.
 
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