All things considered, giving the aid quietly so it won’t be politicized might be for the best.
Absolutely, but that’s not S.O.P. under current administration, so we’re left to wonder.
In a functional, transparent administration it wouldn’t be an issue. Currently, aw hellz yeah it is.
Not necessarily. AN can just blow up if it catches on fire/is stored incorrectly. Look at the West, TX fertilizer explosion and the Texas City Disaster. Both were un-alloyed AN that blew up because of poor storage and/or poor firefighting.
There’s nothing here (so far) that indicates anything else would have had to have happened. And in fact, the orange smoke that they saw prior to the big explosion is something observed in Texas City as well, and probably most other burning AN explosions.
I was thinking the same thing- it was too big of a single bang to have been stored weaponry, or anything except for literally tons of explosive, which is one use of ammonium nitrate besides use as fertilizer.
The above link is to a Wikipedia article about the Texas City disaster of 1947., and until, or if, it is updated, is said to be “one of history’s largest non-nulear explosions.”
Holy crap! That made me jump!
One thing I definitely remember from Simon Winchester’s account was that survivors who were near the explosion didn’t hear anything; the same thing happened when Mt. St. Helens erupted. The sound was absorbed by the particulate matter in the atmosphere.
More casualties that we know of, anyway. I suspect a lot of people were simply evaporated in the explosion.
And not just somebody next to the welder. If someone is welding or cutting a deck or bulkhead, there has to be someone with a phone and a fire extinguisher on the other side of that deck or bulkhead.
Here’s a list of organizations to which you can donate to help.
If you can’t access the article, I’ll link to two:
i was chatting with one of my eod buddies who was in the area in the period shortly after they got saddled with the shit and reputedly the officials were not offered enough bribe money to shift it.
heads will roll over this if the officials in question are still alive.
Cruise ship.
And from the link, apparently the geniuses in charge of the Port of Beirut were storing bags of impounded fireworks in the warehouse with the ammonium nitrate…
Well, sure - after all, that explosive AN has been OK so far, the fireworks should be, too…
The Texas City Disaster was specifically waxed AN.
Sure, but that didn’t have anything to do with it blowing up or catching fire because of contamination. Whatever wax or clay or whatever was there as anti-caking additives.
My point was that ammonium nitrate will just spontaneously catch fire and blow up with poor storage and firefighting. No nefarious or weird chemical goings-on needed.
The port officials claim that they asked the court that impounded the stuff for permission to give it to the military or a company that handles such things multiple times, with nary a response. We’ll see. I can imagine the corrupt officials at the top would be eager to blame it all on the port officials.
The mobs seem to have some clue about who is really responsible, though.
Woah
There are eyewitness videos coming out of people in the devastation zone getting hit with the shockwave point blank and surviving.
Apparently outside of a couple hundred meters, the blast is powerful enough to rip apart rigid structures but not strong enough to kill a person.
I find that amazing.
It’s like a strong wind knocking down a tree but not the grass and shrubs around it - the grass and shrubs are more yielding. A building resists moving until it breaks. A human being is just shoved through the air which may or may not be fatal depending on a bunch of factors, such as how far from the explosion they’re standing. While the people who took those videos were hit directly by the shockwave they were some distance from the origin, by which point the force of the shockwave had diminished sufficiently to be survivable.
I get it.
I just find it amazing!