Fireworks/Munitions Factory in the port of Beirut explodes

[bilby]

Some sources are saying it was 3000 tons of ammonia nitrate that blew. Ammonia nitrate is inert unless there is a fuel and a detonator. It is used in mining and fuel oil is added and a detonator.

The red smoke also supports the ammonia nitrate

Not exactly. Generally, ammonium nitrate is stable.

That is, when not supplied with pressure, heat, and confinement...

But when you have giant tonne+ bags of it left in giant piles, it will cake and become like concrete, and when it's piled like that you get the pressure...

Really all it would take is a bit of heat.

Caking it isn't enough to let it be set off by heat. It takes a substantial shock--it won't even go off for a normal blasting cap. However, there were explosives going off nearby, maybe something landed in it. I don't know if it can be set off by a bit of it being caught under enough falling weight (say, a caked mass dislodged by the fire or the firefighting efforts.)

There are plenty of cases of people blowing themselves up by trying to break up caked AN fertiliser with a crowbar or pick. It needs a fair old whack, but it certainly can be done.

AN makes a fairly good explosive all on its own; 2,750 tonnes of AN yields about the same explosion as 1,000 tonnes of TNT.

In mining, they usually mix it with fuel oil (ANFO), as this significantly increases the explosive power, at very low cost. When AN goes up, it yields a big excess of oxygen, and adding hydrocarbons to scavenge that excess is a big boost to efficiency.

A one kiloton explosion is certainly enough to raze a small town, or a large fraction of a city.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917; and Port Texas in 1947 were both practically destroyed by a few thousand tonnes of AN. West, Texas was a very small town, and was devastated by an amount of AN exploding that was about ten percent of the size of Halifax, Port Texas, or Beirut.

 

[Jarhyn]

Video shows lots of small explosions prior to big one.
They also say, they were repairing wall or something with welding at the time.

Let me get it straight, this stuff will explode under moderate pressure and temperature?
12 feet is tiny pressure.

... Welding near the ammonium nitrate? That's almost absolutely guaranteed to do the trick.

And with caking expected, the confinement provided will turn any ignition into a tamped explosion.

God damn this whole situation is so fucking stupid it is unbelievable.

And they were trying to get reexport permission on this stuff for a very long time before this happened.

Ultimately, the party responsible here is the port authority that denied re-export permissions. I personally don't blame the people who stowed it because they were not experts on explosive storage, and we're never expected to be; it's not like they asked to have that cargo dumped in their laps, after all.

 

[bilby]

 

[bilby]

It certainly made a fairly large crater.

 

[barbos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Safety,_handling,_and_storage

Large stockpiles of the material can also be a major fire risk due to their supporting oxidation, a situation which can easily escalate to detonation

It does look like explosion should not surprise anyone.

 

[Jarhyn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate#Safety,_handling,_and_storage

Large stockpiles of the material can also be a major fire risk due to their supporting oxidation, a situation which can easily escalate to detonation

It does look like explosion should not surprise anyone.

As I said, the situation was a literal powderkeg. The moral of the story? Don't put thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate in a fucking warehouse for years.

Honestly, we may never know what actually touched it off. Only that there were so many ways for it to happen given the situation that the result was really inevitable so long as the port authority left it to sit.

 

[barbos]

Honestly, we may never know what actually touched it off. Only that there were so many ways for it to happen given the situation that the result was really inevitable so long as the port authority left it to sit.

Well, we know it started with a large fire.

Speaking of nitrates, I remember I tried to make gun powder when I was a kid. I did not have potassium nitrate required but had sodium nitrate, it did not work well in the gun powder but was great as oxidizer supporting burning different stuff. We made rockets using paper and sodium nitrate.
You can put wood on fire and then stick it into nitrate and it burns like in pure oxygen, it was great. Ammonium nitrate was useless, did not do any of that, it would melt and that's it, probably temperature was too low.

 

[Jarhyn]

Honestly, we may never know what actually touched it off. Only that there were so many ways for it to happen given the situation that the result was really inevitable so long as the port authority left it to sit.

Well, we know it started with a large fire.

Speaking of nitrates, I remember I tried to make gun powder when I was a kid. I did not have potassium nitrate required but had sodium nitrate, it did not work well in the gun powder but was great as oxidizer supporting burning different stuff. We made rockets using paper and sodium nitrate.
You can put wood on fire and then stick it into nitrate and it burns like in pure oxygen, it was great. Ammonium nitrate was useless, did not do any of that, it would melt and that's it, probably temperature was too low.

The temperature is definitely going to be too low to burn or ignite fresh, properly stored ammonium nitrate.

But again, if we're talking that warehouse and substantial fires, this is different from a bit of wood a kid is trying to burn. This is because kids are going to have a hard time replicating the drafting, replicating the higher burning energy of plastics, replicating the larger feedstocks of flame, and replicating the effects of metal burning, or invoking potential electrical fires and arcing.

As has been pointed out, this whole thing was probably one of the biggest literal powderkegs in the history of our species. And it was just left sitting there waiting to blow by the port authority.

 

[barbos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disaster

these accidents happens quite often

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Caking it isn't enough to let it be set off by heat. It takes a substantial shock--it won't even go off for a normal blasting cap. However, there were explosives going off nearby, maybe something landed in it. I don't know if it can be set off by a bit of it being caught under enough falling weight (say, a caked mass dislodged by the fire or the firefighting efforts.)

There are plenty of cases of people blowing themselves up by trying to break up caked AN fertiliser with a crowbar or pick. It needs a fair old whack, but it certainly can be done.

Note that if there's a bump on the cake and the impact tool strikes that bump you have a shock and a lot of pressure concentrated at that one point. The caking just provides a solid structure to permit concentrating the force of the whack.

 

[Jarhyn]

Caking it isn't enough to let it be set off by heat. It takes a substantial shock--it won't even go off for a normal blasting cap. However, there were explosives going off nearby, maybe something landed in it. I don't know if it can be set off by a bit of it being caught under enough falling weight (say, a caked mass dislodged by the fire or the firefighting efforts.)

There are plenty of cases of people blowing themselves up by trying to break up caked AN fertiliser with a crowbar or pick. It needs a fair old whack, but it certainly can be done.

Note that if there's a bump on the cake and the impact tool strikes that bump you have a shock and a lot of pressure concentrated at that one point. The caking just provides a solid structure to permit concentrating the force of the whack.

Not to mention that caked AN is hard. Like, concrete hard. Like, creates a fair deal of heat when fractured, hard.

 

[barbos]

That would be a news to me that one can simply hit it with a hammer and cause an explosion. Good to know.

 

[Jarhyn]

That would be a news to me that one can simply hit it with a hammer and cause an explosion. Good to know.

Well, it has to be caked in such a way as to be able to concentrate large forces in small regions through structural elements, and the force would need to split a hardened region in such a way to generate heat. If you've ever shattered concrete with a sledge or split it with a crowbar, you will notice that the pieces can come of VERY hot. This is because entropy dictates that directed energy ends as heat.

Granted the heat could as easily be generated by sparking against the tool. Or maybe it hits an oxide pocket.

Another possibility is the mixing of metal chemistry into the ammonium nitrate. It is unwise to store most explosives in contact with metal because metal oxides and nitrates can be formed over time, and these are much less stable and more prone to spontaneous detonation. Note: it was stored in a metal warehouse, sagging against the metal walls.

Like, I saw a picture of the warehouse taken some months before the explosion, and all my brain could process was "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE" for a solid couple minutes.

 

[bilby]

That would be a news to me that one can simply hit it with a hammer and cause an explosion. Good to know.

Well, it has to be caked in such a way as to be able to concentrate large forces in small regions through structural elements, and the force would need to split a hardened region in such a way to generate heat. If you've ever shattered concrete with a sledge or split it with a crowbar, you will notice that the pieces can come of VERY hot. This is because entropy dictates that directed energy ends as heat.

Granted the heat could as easily be generated by sparking against the tool. Or maybe it hits an oxide pocket.

Another possibility is the mixing of metal chemistry into the ammonium nitrate. It is unwise to store most explosives in contact with metal because metal oxides and nitrates can be formed over time, and these are much less stable and more prone to spontaneous detonation. Note: it was stored in a metal warehouse, sagging against the metal walls.

Like, I saw a picture of the warehouse taken some months before the explosion, and all my brain could process was "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE" for a solid couple minutes.

It's typically unlawful in most jurisdictions to store or convey any explosives in any facility with exposed iron or steel, due to the risk of sparking. Some places also require safeguards against grit. And hobnailed boots are typically banned in explosives stores too.

Sticking thousands of tonnes of Ammonium Nitrate in a corrugated steel shed in a warm, humid climate, adjacent to a fireworks store and then allowing hotwork such as welding in the vicinity is pretty crazy. Doing this in a crowded urban area is criminally insane.

 

[Tigers!]

Some places seem to build fireworks and munitions production lines in the same factories.

 

[angelo]

I'm shocked the Israelis haven't been blamed...............yet! I read a few days ago on social media that it looks like a Mossad operation. The fake news mills are about to start.

 

[Patooka]

I'm shocked the Israelis haven't been blamed...............yet! I read a few days ago on social media that it looks like a Mossad operation. The fake news mills are about to start.

Good luck to you.

 

[Jarhyn]

I'm shocked the Israelis haven't been blamed...............yet! I read a few days ago on social media that it looks like a Mossad operation. The fake news mills are about to start.

Good luck to you.

Like, what does this say about the conservative/Christian mindset? I've got them on ignore - I can only stand so much of that sort of idiocy, and secondary exposure is more than enough, thanks - but look at the shape of what this says.

"I'm shocked other people don't just blame any bad thing on people they don't like!"

Think about that for a second. They are shocked that people are not using something to attack an inappropriate party. I mean, even if any of us would ever find it appropriate to not actually get to the bottom of things, this situation was ridiculously, laughably obvious (ok, maybe not laughably, given how many people died) that it was the fault of a port authority that was engaged in severe negligence.

Hell, I'm in here, an actual expert on explosives, saying it is surprising this didn't happen YEARS ago.

But here is some fundamentalist Christian Trump supporter going off trying to drag Israel and middle eastern politics into it.

This hilights what I see as a difference in sides: one side is "shocked" when the other side doesn't sink to dishonest tactics... So they engage in dishonest tactics to push the conversation that way!

Angelo, don't bother responding. You are on ignore, and I will not see it. But know this: the people on the left are fundamentally unlike you and your ilk. We actually care about getting to the honest bottom of things. We don't care about our political ideology for its own sake. We aren't focused on winning. Instead we are focused on being right; when we are right about things, how things worked and what things happened, we know that better solutions will naturally flow from that understanding. We are not married to having the universe be what we want to believe, we take it as it is. The reason we have a "liberal bias" is exactly because that is the bias we see the universe, reality itself, as holding. If tomorrow the evidence shifted and new things came to light, we would follow the reality, not our preconceptions or beliefs. Because we in general believe that BELIEF IS TO BE DOUBTED.

Edit: TL;DR:
I dislike organizations and entities because when I look at a problem, I often discover their fingerprints. This is as opposed to the dishonest tactics of disliking an organization and so finding bad things to blame them for (see QAnon, pizzagate, birthergate, BENGAZI, buttery males, etc.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

That would be a news to me that one can simply hit it with a hammer and cause an explosion. Good to know.

Well, it has to be caked in such a way as to be able to concentrate large forces in small regions through structural elements, and the force would need to split a hardened region in such a way to generate heat. If you've ever shattered concrete with a sledge or split it with a crowbar, you will notice that the pieces can come of VERY hot. This is because entropy dictates that directed energy ends as heat.

Granted the heat could as easily be generated by sparking against the tool. Or maybe it hits an oxide pocket.

Another possibility is the mixing of metal chemistry into the ammonium nitrate. It is unwise to store most explosives in contact with metal because metal oxides and nitrates can be formed over time, and these are much less stable and more prone to spontaneous detonation. Note: it was stored in a metal warehouse, sagging against the metal walls.

Like, I saw a picture of the warehouse taken some months before the explosion, and all my brain could process was "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE" for a solid couple minutes.

Ouch, yes. That's how you turn ammonium nitrate into tannerite--I forget exactly what the second compound is but it's aluminum something.

 

[bilby]

That would be a news to me that one can simply hit it with a hammer and cause an explosion. Good to know.

Well, it has to be caked in such a way as to be able to concentrate large forces in small regions through structural elements, and the force would need to split a hardened region in such a way to generate heat. If you've ever shattered concrete with a sledge or split it with a crowbar, you will notice that the pieces can come of VERY hot. This is because entropy dictates that directed energy ends as heat.

Granted the heat could as easily be generated by sparking against the tool. Or maybe it hits an oxide pocket.

Another possibility is the mixing of metal chemistry into the ammonium nitrate. It is unwise to store most explosives in contact with metal because metal oxides and nitrates can be formed over time, and these are much less stable and more prone to spontaneous detonation. Note: it was stored in a metal warehouse, sagging against the metal walls.

Like, I saw a picture of the warehouse taken some months before the explosion, and all my brain could process was "NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE" for a solid couple minutes.

Ouch, yes. That's how you turn ammonium nitrate into tannerite--I forget exactly what the second compound is but it's aluminum something.

Ammonal is a well known explosive, and is simply a mixture of AN and aluminium powder. It's widely used in munitions, as it is similar to TNT in terms of yield.

Its maximum explosive power mixing ratio is (oddly) quite stable, but mixtures with very low aluminium:AN ratios are surprisingly sensitive. IIRC, a 5:95 ratio (Al:AN) is peak sensitivity. In a warm, humid climate, bags of AN stored in a building with aluminium structural elements is a serious no-no. Even a fairly small layer of low-Al ammonal would be a severe danger, and would make an excellent detonator for the bulk of the AN.

I understand that Tannerite is a patent mixture of AN, aluminium powder, and some catalysts, designed to have low sensitivity. Presumably it's got a fairly high Aluminium content, and makes an efficient bang without being overly sensitive.