But their search for the dead has just started, they may yet match Oppau and TC. A larger problem is the 300,000 people now homeless due to the blast. Plus food shortages and a destroyed port hindering aid relief.
Authorities have arrested port officials for never moving the 2750 metric tonnes (3030 US tons) for the last six years. But will the original owner ever face justice?
I saw a few twitter conspiracy comments that disbelieved the 2750 amount, saying that the Oklahoma City bomb (2 tons), caused almost as much damage. BS! Beirut damage is at least an order of magnitude worse. And they overlook the fact that at Oklahoma City the ammonium nitrate used was dosed with nitromethane. That turned it into ANNM with double the detonation velocity of ammonium nitrate alone. Plus ANNM has more capability to break concrete and cut steel, i.e. brisance.
The damage was probably also so great becuase the volume of the 'explosives' was so great. The show wave from the farthest part of the explosion arrived 'much' later than from the nearest one - by standards of explosives. This extended the period of overpressure and that's what does huge damage to building structures.
ReplyDeleteThe (apparent) corn silo right next to the explosion site was luckily filled and all that mass inside had such a huge inertia that the whole thing was able to somewhat protect much of the city by deflecting much energy of the blast upwards.
BTW, I saw this and due to the coloured smoke cloud I immediately concluded that it looked dissimilar to previous munitions storage explosions or large real explosives explosions. The absence of reporting on radioactivity excluded the possibility of a nuclear explosion with today's technology.
Only very incompetent "generals" would think that this was a mere "bomb explosion".
No US general told the lying moron that it was an attack. Unless maybe it was his attorney general. Otherwise he made it up and created an international incident.
ReplyDeleteThere have been conspiracy theories of increased radioactivity over Sicily. But the wind was blowing east. The smoke clouds reached Damascus through the Ḍahr al-Baydar pass.
My guess is that the colored smoke was nitric acid and nitrogen dioxide. There were many claims of toxicity, including an alert from the US embassy there.
You are probably right about the shielding of the grain silos, else damage could have been much worse.
Now the MAGAfanaticus are claiming Trump was right, it was an attack. Their claim is based on a photo taken a few days prior. That photo showed huge bags of ammonium nitrate marked a Nitroprill. Then someone googled it a found a Nitropril made in Australia that is specifically used as a blasting agent in quarries and mining applications. From that the conspiracy theories metastasized.
ReplyDeleteNone of that is true. The ammonium nitrate in the Beirut disaster was in fact a fertilizer and not manufactured to be used as an explosive. They were a High Density Ammonium Nitrate (HDAN), which is a nitrogenous dry fertilizer product and is differentiated from Low Density Ammonium Nitrate (LDAN). LDAN is the grade used primarily in explosive applications and is sometimes referred to as Industrial Grade AN. Only low density ammonium nitrate (LDAN) is manufactured as a quarrying or mining explosive. The nitroprill bags in Beirut were high density as can be seen on the photo:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EexPDn-X0AMSjR0?format=jpg&name=large
A prill is just a form of pellet. The term has nothing to do with explosives. Most fertilizers are now made in prills to keep down dust. The fertilizer I use on the lilacs and hydrangeas is prilled or pelletized, as is my bride's laundry detergent.
And it was made in the Republic of Georgia, not Australia. By a firm called Rustavi Azot LLC. Which may (or may not) have (or had back in 2013) a connection to Dmytro Firtash, a former Ukrainian oligarch. Firtash has some connections with Lev Parnas, Paul Manafort, and President Bonespurs personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. So I may start my own conspiracy theory. Where can I buy a tin hat?
The lying moron blathered nonsense because of ignorance and the urge to blather. This cultists predictably and habitually rushed t make up excuses and fake evidence (I even saw a video that made it look like a glide bomb approached) to support the blathering.
DeleteI think the lying moron will have his wish of NATO going away if the dumbfucks give him another "four" years.
BTW, right now the U.S. is applying sanctions against companies related to NordStream 2, and guess which voting district i Germany was hit particularly hard? Merkel's. That's either audacious in a most descpicable way or plain incompetent.
'That's either audacious in a most despicable way or plain incompetent."
ReplyDeleteBoth!
NATO has issues other than Trump.
#1 Erdogan is the cuckoobird egg in the NATO nest sucking up to Russia and promoting terrorism in Syria and Libya.
#2 Turkish longtime antagonism to Greece & recently to France.
#3 Afghanistan.
#4 Putin's ongoing efforts to divide Europe appear to be gaining ground.
and perhaps the biggest problem in NATO #5 Jens Stoltenberg.
How do we fix it?
There's a mantra in Europe that we need to do things together, not as individual nations. The problem is that we hardly do anything together in foreign policy, so hardly anything gets done.
DeleteI'm a proponent of cooperation, but I see limits to the approach.
We should kill the 1997 PCA trade treaty with Russia and fuck them up.
Reducing our crude oil consumption with use of hydrogen fuel in long range aviation and battery-powered short range (<500 km) traffic will help erode their economy a bit.
We should also be a lot more overt and disrespectful in regard to Russia and Belarus which pretend to have superior morals with their gay-hating and shows of pseudo-manliness and expose them regularly as hypercorrupt plutocracies that fail at just about everything that doesn't exploit Soviet legacy (such as arms and gas turbine exports or Soyuz rockets) or natural resources. They haven't developed a single high tech business model in 30 years. Their economy is a total failure and the average and median Russians live a materially shitty life.
There's NOTHING superior about Russian society.
Turkey is living way beyond its means. Say no when they call for the IMF. Erdogan repeatedly tried to blackmail Europe with refugees. Well, Europe could easily grow some balls and get rid of the entire refugee problem.
Sadly, the EU cannot even agree on doing the most obvious thing about the refugee stream across the Mediterranean. And that's another reason why national governments need to tell at EU meetings that either there's a satisfactory policy or the others can shove their European unification ideology and dreams of prosperity-by-EU where the sun don't shine.
Oh, BTW, the simple countermeasure to drowning refugees is to allow them to arrive by airline. Human trafficking services way more expensive than a two-way ticket, but airlines refuse refugees because they get de facto fined for it due to a EU policy. There, all the "sea rescue" bullshit has been bullshit all along.
Travelling by air would burden the northern countries which would be the country of first arrival, and that means they would be responsible for the handling. Now guess why that stupid policy doesn't get changed.
#3 Afghanistan is no problem for NATO. It's a petty nothing that practically nobody cares about. ISAF or whatever it's called these days is a political residue and a testament of bureaucratic inertia and path dependency.