Ammonium Nitrate

"LONDON -- More than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate was stored in the Beirut warehouse that was the scene of Tuesday's deadly explosion that killed dozens of people in the Lebanese capital, authorities say."

That is about three digits larger than the Oklahoma City truck bomb.

Here is the Google Maps overhead view, pre-blast:


That silo structure seems to be 16 tubes long in the picture above, down only slightly to 14 tubes in the disaster pictures. (Don't yet see if the building's width shrank.) But other pictures suggest that none of the other multi-story buildings shown on this map remain standing.

In particular, I can find no post-blast hint of this building, shown a fraction of a second before the blast wave envelopes it:


The dark horizontal hole in this blast wave is the "shadow" of that building's roof. The shock wave went right through the walls.

 

Synthesized using the famous Haber-Bosch process for which Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch ( later of I.G. Farben ) received the Nobel Prize.

Today, they are AGFA, Hoerst Celanese, Bayer and BASF and a few other subsidies.

Ammonium Nitrate is the main component of fertilizers and many explosives.

I.G. Farben had a subsidy, GEGESH that produced Zyklon B (cyclone blausauer or Prussic acid which is hydrogen cyanide).

 

I was once in a room with about 100 kg of ANFO, and I did not like it.

Actually the students where making clumps smaller by hitting them with a metal hammer on a metal desk. It is a highly ineffective way to start the action, but I did ask them to substitute wood on both sides and to be gentle.

In the unlikely event ... some walls would have blown out and no recognizable parts of those two would likely have been recovered.

Video above shows 27 thousand times larger if their accounting is accurate.

 

Apparently it registered as a magnitude 3.3 earthquake on seismographs. And was that low because it was an above ground blast, the bulk of the energy went into the atmosphere, not ground. I haven't seen an estimate for how it would have scored as an underground blast.

 

Checking around, it appears that if this event actually had 2700 tons of ANFO detonate at once, then it was equivalent to about 2000 tons of TNT. I.e. small nuclear class, larger than suitcase and some tactical nukes.

This would put it larger than the 1947 Texas City / Galveston Bay explosion (2300 imp tons of AN (without the FO), or 876 tons TNT), but less than the 1917 Halifax explosion (2900 tons TNT equivalent). And less than a 1987 military test of 4685 tons ANFO / 3900 tons TNT).

Beware likely imperial-metric and other conversion issues in the above figures. And from pictures, it seems that smaller batches may have gone up before the motherload detonated.

 

Morning news is reporting 2,700 TONS versus our 2 ton McVeigh bomb. I was 2 blocks from that one when it blew and I can't imagine being anywhere near this one. The pressure wave did amazing things including raising my NEC multisync monitor several inches off my desk in front of me.

 

Exactly what Tim McVeigh used to bomb the Oklahoma City Federal Building.

 

Imagine the damage if it had been inland and surrounded on al sides by buildings and people.

 

He mixed it with fuel oil, as I recall.

I was working at the Detroit federal courthouse at the time. Terry Nichols was a Michigan boy and McVeigh hatched the plot with him there. It would probably have been us, if they hadn't decided the Murrah building would be easier to collapse. (The Detroit courthouse is a very squat, very concrete structure dating from the Hoover administration.)

Presumably mixed-with-fuel-oil isn't a common way to warehouse the stuff.

 

Yes, and it was arranged to be directional.

I was there, standing on "the pile" with first aid kits as the first firetrucks arrived and was in the crowd of bloody people running south fast as the second device alert was sounded to clear the site. There was no second device but nobody knew that then. You cannot image the amount of glass that was on the streets. It was like walking on beach sand for blocks and blocks. I can tell more if anyone wants to know. I'll never forget it. April 19, 1995.

 

The person with my same job but in OKC was getting bits of glass out of her scalp in the shower for a long time after.

 

Sunrise pictures reveal that the nearest still-standing building (other than some of the silo) is a significant distance outside the plot I pictured. The red circle here marks what is now a seawater-filled crater:


All the silo walls facing the blast are ripped open, spilling their powdered contents. It seems the silos were mostly full. I suspect this stored powdered material absorbed enough of the blast to allow the far side of the structure to remain standing.

 

We're still in early days (minutes) but fake news is saying that the explosion was caused by some seized Rooskie NH 4NO 3 (ammonium nitrate) - which is a highly volatile material that's used in agricultural fertilizer....and high-grade explosives.
As mentioned above, ANFO or AN/FO, is a purpose-made ammonium nitrate/fuel oil mixture making it a little less efficient as a fertilizer, and there is no indication that the fertilizer was oily, otherwise the Lebaneese would have stored it a little differently.
Open Source says that the fertilizer was bound for sub-Saharan Africa and was seized from the Rooskies as much as a few years ago, and without a shred of irony it was placed into a port warehouse in Beirut, Lebanon for "safe keeping."

Just a SWAG from me but I'm smelling some under refrigerated fish with the "industrial accident" theory, since ammonium nitrate needs something to get things started if you're wanting to use it as an explosive.
Welding would do it...maybe....but there's waaaaaaaaaaay too MANY farmers with piles of the stuff in their barns and way too few barns being turned into kindling.

YMMV.......

The main wonder is who benefits.

Me?
I sorta like Persians, since they're usually into doing things big, and they're not real blabby about it afterwards....BUT...it could have been a welder......a REALLY stupid one.

 

Ammonium nitrate fertilizer is sold with some amount of fuel oil mixed in. This simplifies the product chain (can't think of any other reason). I don't know if that ANFO contains the ideal amount of FO for booms.

If we had a powderman here, answers would be forthcoming.

Other discussions remind me that Tianjin explosion involved this chemical, perhaps on the 1000-ton scale?

 

Revision time ---

Current reports suggest that is it 'just' AN, which is less potent than ANFO, reducing the equivalency to 1155 tons of TNT. (Translation rate is 0.74 for ANFO, 0.42 for AN.)

Whoever is keeping up this Wikipedia page is scoring it as 2200 tons TNT equivalent. Tune in again later for updates from folks who might actually have some expertise, rather than merely surf the web: Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions - Wikipedia

As for how it was ignited, I'm not ready to discount spontaneous degeneration and ignition under local environmental conditions, which are hinted at in other incidents. The stuff has been in Beirut since 2013 when it arrived on a Russian freighter in too much financial distress to continue to its intended destination. Port officials who knew about it have being trying to get it removed ever since, but have been stymied by the speed of bureaucracy, which is even slower under truly dysfunctional governments than we first-worlders are accustomed to.

If isolated behind a bamboo curtain, the above page ranks Tianjin as the #10 accidental blast, at 330 tons.

 

I think we discussed details of that explosion after it happened. I just did not quickly look for that discussion.

The AN fertilizer bags I 'met' smelled like diesel. However they may contain less diesel than powdermen use. I have unsupported guess that it could be added to keep the 'prils' from absorbing atmospheric moisture.

I am not in an ideal position to research this topic

 

many people asked government to move it out of there over the last seven years.

just another case of government inaction letting people down and causing harm to them

 

Like what's happening somewhere much closer to us?