I saw security camera footage of someone who probably didn’t survive–a woman standng at a glass door in a store looking outside when the door exploded and she was tossed backwards in a hail of a million shards of glass.
And people survived very close to ground zero at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki with no injuries or long term complications.
Its just your luck.
I read a casualty analysis which noted that injuries and fatalities tend to paradoxically increase at some distance from the blast due to flying glass. The shockwave and sound take some time to travel the distance, but the flash is instantly seen and draws people to windows.
[quote=“mikecurtis, post:118, topic:917267, full:true”]…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.
[/quote]
Blast overpressure, by itself, is usually more damaging to structures than it is fatal to people. See, e.g., this CDC report looking at mine explosions, overpressure, and human susceptibility (citing Glasstone and Dolan): https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docket/archive/pdfs/NIOSH-125/125-ExplosionsandRefugeChambers.pdf
From it,
The human body can survive relatively high blast overpressure without experiencing barotrauma. A 5 psi blast overpressure will rupture eardrums in about 1% of subjects, and a 45 psi overpressure will cause eardrum rupture in about 99% of all subjects. The threshold for lung damage occurs at about 15 psi blast overpressure. A 35-45 psi overpressure may cause 1% fatalities, and 55 to 65 psi overpressure may cause 99% fatalities.
15 psi is dropping the vast majority of residential structures, and it will remove curtain walls on more stoutly built structures. But, as the noted sage Ron White has noted, concerning hurricanes, "It’s not that the wind is blowin’; it’s what the wind is blowin’" Debris entrained within the blast wave will cause much more extensive injuries, and accordingly, a 10 PSI overpressure wave from a large explosion is considered to be nearly universally lethal to people exposed to it in the open.
Human beings can be surprisingly resilient to injury.
This is empirically demonstrated by a random walk on youtube through witness’s cell phone videos of large explosions. Invariably, the person is filming the disaster with their phone, while standing behind a window. Sliding glass door, whatever.
They see the big condensation cloud form and rise and often don’t think about taking cover, away from the imminent flying razor blades factory they’re standing right next to. The blast wave hits, and you know the rest.
So I totally buy those findings. Flying glass is dangerous.
My EOD buddy says that if you manage to see the explosion to drop and not stand there gawking, and try to find a spot in the blast shadow of something solid - it helps to avoid all the shrapnel.
4K footage of explosion. Be sure to change your youtube settings to at least 1080.
One of the things I find interesting about this is that the video gets wobbly right after explosion but before shockwave arrives. I presume this is because the camera was mounted and the waves traveled through the ground more quickly than the air.
Better to step down than be strung up, I reckon.
This is the video I mentioned. Not gory, but if you watch it, you are probably watching a snuff film.
Yes. Discussed here. You can even hear the effects of the quake, shortly before the blast wave arrives.
What are the flashes seen in the smoke before the big explosion?
My guess is the confiscated fireworks that caught on fire in the first place. Supposedly, they look like you’d expect pyrotechnic ‘salutes’ to look like if detonated at ground level.
Huh… to me “snuff film” has always meant a film deliberately made of a death in order give pleasure to the viewer (sub-genre of sexual pleasure). That strikes me as different than the accidental capture of a fatality on video.
And we don’t know that the woman caught on video there was killed. Sure, a strong possibility but we don’t know for sure. Almost certainly injured to some degree. A lot depends on what kind of glass the door was made of - some types are designed to fracture into less-lethal chunks rather than razor-sharp shards. Safety glass for shop doors is actually fairly common and if that’s what was used the woman might have suffered only survivable injuries.
Here’s a good set of charts on the effects of overpressure (they’re for nuclear weapons, but when you’re talking about kilotons of explosive, it all blurs together)
I bet the scientists are going to look at damage at various distances and back into their estimate for how large the explosion actually was.
Here’s a nuclear weapon blast mapper- you can put in about 2-2.5 kilotons and map it wherever you want to get an idea of the level of destruction. Just ignore the radiation part.
Way upthread, I linked to some tweets by the armscontrolwonk folks where they were using those damage scaling equations and geolocation to do just that. I.e., note damage to building, note distance from crater, determine likely overpressure at that building, determine explosive yield. Repeat for building 2, and so on.
They came up with about a 200-400 ton TNT equivalent yield. Which made sense to me. The Boom! looked smaller than Tianjin’s, which was about 1 kt, IIRC.
Apologies if this has been posted already; it’s a fantastic HD shot of the port explosion. The POV is a hi-rise building looking at the site on the side of the silo where the explosion occurred. The fire is in full view as is the massive fireball itself. You can even see people on a balcony at a nearby building. The explosion is at 2:30 and then a shorter clip plays at .25x speed. I slowed it down to .25x of that with YouTube’s built-in controls ( shift , or the lesser-than symbol < ) and holy fuck is that some scary shit. The fireball is plenty scary, but then seeing the shockwave just blast the shit out of everything… wow. I do not want to experience anything like that.
Yes. Anti-caking additives or contaminates make a basically stable and harmless material both more sensitive and more powerful, as happened in the Texas City disaster.
This goes to the question (to which I was responding) of why the port was storing huge quantities of “dangerous material”: the answer is that AN is not handled or stored as an explosive: it’s handled and stored as a fertilizer.
You can call it whatever you want, but if it’s stored improperly, it can become an explosive. That can be true of items such as coal or grain. On top of that, not all AN is the same grade.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/ripped-chemical-bags-added-to-risk-of-beirut-blast/
I wouldn’t call it a snuff film because it had no sexual overtones, and they were in the process of moving away from the window when the shock wave hit.
Someone will probably eventually see that who knows who those women are/were, and let whoever posted it know their fates.
I was using something known as “poetic license.”