Large explosion in Beirut... 23

[waross]

"a shipment of ammonium nitrate estimated at 2,750 tons"
I doubt that the fireworks would have initiated the ammonium nitrate blast.
5 Miles of det cord could have initiated the ammonium nitrate blast, if it was det cord.
And det cord itself is not easy to initiate.
If the ammonium nitrate detonated spontaneously, the other explosives would have added little.
25 tons of fireworks is less than 1% and that has a low percentage of actual powder.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

You use relatively little safety cord when blasting.

Its your first section which allows you to get away from the site. The cord connecting all the charges together is all fast det cord so the whole face goes off together. In fact in mining I suspect they will electrically fire so it will be a few detonators onto ends of det cord which fire the whole lot. With det cord you don't need a detonator on the end for each charge pack you just push it into the plastic. You just need one to ignite the det cord. But you would parallel them up in case of a miss fire.

If your firing using safety slow fuse. You cut your length for the time you require it then goes into the det cord ignitor and then you trigger it and walk away with your stop watch running.

As Bill says det cord is relatively hard to get it to go bang. You cut it with a knife, you can eat it and if you burn it then it burns hot without going bang. Detonators are more like bullets and can cook off. A fire work explosion would be enough of a bang to trigger it in explosive mode. The explosives I used were relatively safe including det cord, the detonator's were the high risk items. Which is why we preferred to use slow fuses onto ignitors just a pain when you had a miss fire and had to hang around for hours for the miss fire drill. But there was no problem throwing 2 kg of PX and a reel of det cord plus 10 meters of slow fuse in the back of a landrover to go and cut tank tracks off. If you had dets with you it was a pain in the bum but you got the job done quicker.

 

[JohnRBaker]

If you go back and watch the films of the explosion you can clearly see what looked like ether fireworks or ammo cooking off during the smaller initial fire. Also, from the film and the satellite photos of the area after the blast, it looked as if that initial fire and those secondary smaller explosions (the possible fireworks/ammo), were likely coming from a building closer to the wharf but next to one that apparently contained the ammonium nitrate (as noted in the sat-photos).

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

This is charge bag burning which we used to do every time we were on the ranges with artillery.

https://youtu.be/xkK9XJA902w.

The ammo comes in war state with 6-8 different power settings but in peace time for training they only fire charge one to save wear on the barrel and firing charge super it kicks the hell out of your body. From memory it was 10 rounds and various bits started bleeding of the gun crew (never was near one that fired more than charge 3 and it was bad enough).

I suspect the fireworks/ammo triggered the det cord to go into fast burn mode which was enough to trigger the rest of it in explosive mode. I have a few numbers for temperature and kJ to be applied floating round my head but its been 25 years since since I had the joy of have PX as a tool to use. We mostly used it for cutting. Make a 1cm sausage of PX, get a cereal box and cut a strip and fold length ways to form a V, put a bit of copper wire inside the V at the apex and the PX on the other side. Stick a bit of det cord in the PX and 25cm of safety cord plus igniter onto that. Set it going and walk away. 15 mins later bang and the H beam or tank track was cut in two.

I always got a buzz about only using just enough to get the job done so always had minimal collateral damage when using it...

 

[MartinLe]

It's kinda weird how this thread went from "what happened in Beirut" to "I don't travel into the USA and avoid certain searches etc. because of cops" to "and this is how to cut a steel beam or tank track with commercial explosives"

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

If we get into how to sterilise the smelly toilets in the workshop using a colbot60
radiography source it will get into the realms of project meeting in Aberdeen in the late 80's.

Btw it works 30 min exposure with all the outside doors locked.

 

Thanks Alistair, that's a useful data point.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

 

[moon161]

f we get into how to sterilise the smelly toilets in the workshop using a colbot60
radiography source it will get into the realms of project meeting in Aberdeen in the late 80's.

Btw it works 30 min exposure with all the outside doors locked.

This is a comic book origin story for sure.

 

[MartinLe]

The way 2020 is going some of this will feel like foreshadowing by christmas

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

More like Silverburn place Bridge of Don moon161. Things changed for the better in Aberdeen after the Cullen report came out. Before that some weird and wonderful solutions were done without much thought about the consequences if anything went wrong.

 

[moon161]

If it didn't make the news, the radioactive 'Loo Thing' was either short lived or well behaved.

 

[Alistair_Heaton]

They used various isotopes for taking radiographs for NDT of welds.

They were stored in depleted uranium techops wind out cases. You set everything up with the collimator over the site of the weld then wound the isotope pill out of its shielding container to expose the film. Most of the time it was caesium sources but there were a few cobalt 60 sources around.

When the sources was wound out it was inside a sealed capsule which was then inside a delivery tube so as soon as it was wound back in then it was shielded again and no contamination of the area exposed.

 

[moon161]

My visions of swamp thing in a kilt are dashed.
Gamma emitter, so that's probably in the gamma backscatter trucks at the canadian border for near 20 years now. Used to be able to cross the border both ways without ID, not anymore, for sure.

 

Used to be able to cross the border both ways without ID, not anymore, for sure.

And now why would you want to cross it again? To meet mask and social distancing conscientious objectors?

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."

 

[moon161]

Touche'. I keep telling kids the US was a much more easygoing place in the 90's. My neighbor has family in canada and is talking about moving.

 

[1503-44]

90's? My brother and I used to travel by train alone Boston<->Chicago on the Penn Central and Milwakee Rd lines in the late 50's. We were 8 and 10 yrs old. In the 60s we did Houston<->Chicago Chicago<->Calumet, Michigan on Santa Fe and Milwakee Rd, but we were older and highly experienced travelers by then. We'd stay on the trains until they stopped and didn't move anymore, each destination being the end of the line. I think my dad paid the conductor a bit extra to keep an eye on us. Hard to even imagine that today.

I was 10km from two bombings in Riyadh in 1995 and 96 and 2km from the ammonia truck crash in Houston '76.

https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/27/...saudis-aided-by-the-fbi-seek-blast-clues.html

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-...monia-truck-disaster-claimed-the-12906732.php

Those were way close enough for me.

BTW even US citizens have no bill of rights crossing customs, until you get across to the exit door. So says my Iranian carpets and Cuban cigars. They let me keep the cigars.

 

[JohnRBaker]

Back in the 80's I missed the bombing of the car-park for our Bangkok office by a couple of days. No one was hurt but it did mess-up a bunch of cars. They also 'bombed' the door of our office in Cologne, but that was when we were still part of McDonnell Douglas so we always suspected that they were just 'demonstrating' agasint the company (the damage was limited to just some brick and mortar around the door). However, after that we were told that when traveling outside the country, that we were asked to remove all mention of the company name from our luggage and briefcases, and to never wear our company badges outside of the office and to be careful who you handed your business cards to.

That all changed in 1991 when our division was sold to EDS, now we only had to worry about the people who didn't like GM. When we were finally sold to Siemens, it was great, since no matter where we went, everyone really seemed to like Siemens and the people who worked there.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[JohnRBaker]

They may have found a survivor in a collapsed building in Beirut:

A month on, signal in Beirut rubble raises hope for survivor

https://apnews.com/1744e807bfc465c4220fafff2395b558

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[Phil1934]

Big fire there now in a warehouse that stores oil and tires

https://www.9news.com.au/world/beir...ast-news/8b257f45-27ed-4809-82cb-ae9029b9a883

 

[charliealphabravo]

This documentary was posted to YT. Many more perspectives of the blast that I hadn't seen before.

Edit: Now that I look around I think all these have probably been on YT for awhile now.