HERE IS A LINK to a story about a ship laden with explosives, owned by a fictional Sudanese company.
750 tons of explosives! It is described as “a floating atomic bomb”.
HERE IS A LINK to the Grandcamp explosion of '47, which destroyed Texas City, TX, killing hundreds.
Both ships were carrying ammonium nitrate or dervived explosives.
Was this ship wired up to be a giant floating bomb!?!
Are there others?
Ever since I first saw that special documentary on Texas City, I knew somebody would try to pull this sort of thing, to replicate the disaster as an act of war.
Input? Opinions? Possible tactics? Effects on the global economy?
My grandmother (rest her soul) told me a story about that blast. She was a senior at Milby High Scool in Southeast Houston. She lived less than a mile from the Houston Ship Channel.
She told me that the blast was so great from the Texas City explosion, that her mothers house leaned away from the explosion.
It was a terrible day, and one that changed the entire chemical industry forever. Sweeping changes happened at the Federal level that are felt even today. Still, Galveston, Texas City, Pasadena, Deer Park and the area surrounding the Houston Ship Channel still pollute at record levels. Driving down Laporte Freeway (Texas 225 I think) is a nightmare on the lungs and the nose.
Some good is being done though; Game wardens are now patrolling the Ship Channel to catch polluters, and dreging is being halted in some areas to save the last Cypress Swamp in Texas.
And there was a second ship ablaze that was towed off before it blew. I have seen some home movie film footage of the blast and it was stunning. Quite a blast. And I’ve seen the memorial.
As for being surprised…not at all. Years ago I told a buddy I thought it would just be a matter of time before somebody sailed a ship carrying a nuke into a major harbor and set it off.
The night of 9-11-01 he called and the first thing he said was, “Well, it wasn’t a nuke in the harbor…”
Well, I officially spend way too much time on these boards. When I read this story on www.agonist.org , my first reaction was “Damn! Just like Texas City! I’ve got to tell Bosda about this!” But I see you’re a step ahead of me.
Wasn’t there a TV movie a few years back called “Special Bulletin” that involved a terrorist nuke going off aboard a ship in Charlston, SC harbor?
Anyhow, I had heard of the Texas City disaster but had never read the full details, so thanks for that. I guess that shows ammonium nitrate charges are scalable to more or less whatever size one wants.
Since I live in the Houston area, maybe I’ll head down that way this weekend.
Just a note about the Greek person who said it amounted to an atomic bomb. If the cargo were TNT, it would amount to about 1/20th of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan. I don’t think ammonium nitrate, pound for pount, yields any additional energy over TNT.
Not trying to minimize what could certainly be a big problem Just trying to keep the language in the ballpark.
I hadn’t heard about Texas City before. From the linked page, it sounds very much like the 1917 Halifax Explosion. I’ve heard that described as the biggest man-made bomb before Hiroshima.
Well, this should provide ALL SORTS of interesting leads. Bills of lading. Ship’s itineraries. I’m sure the people who put this one together must have worked hard to conceal the paper trail and so forth, but there’s going to be an awful lot to conceal. I’m hoping Al-Qaeda takes a pretty good hit on this one, if they’re the originators.
I would also note that in their Sept. 11 strike, Al-Qaeda used multiple strikes. A similar strategy may be in use here. Provided it’s Al-Qaeda.
No matter how much I’d like to agree with you samclem, I’m still worried about someone mooring an explosives laden vessel like this next to a natural gas storage facility.
According to the CNN story, there’s no indications of a connection to terrorism. It seems the captain just refused to deliver the cargo until he was given more money. A greedy bastard, but hardly a terrorist.
Hard to tell what the presence of 8,000 detonators means. It might legitimize the cargo, and then again, it might not. Supposedly, the shipment was bound for Sudan. We all love Sudan, no?
Scary stuff, indeed. I’ve always thought the most potentially devastating terrorist attack is the “nuke in the harbor” possibility discussed above. After all, you don’t have to get past customs, you don’t even have to it to shore. This is one of those things where “close enough” will do the, er, job.
The word “kiloton” (or “kilotonne” for those of us in the UK or Commonwealth Nations) simply means “1000 Tons of TNT” or its equivalent in other forms of explosives.
So a cargo ship carrying 1000 tons of dynamite wired up to all go off at once has the equivalent blast power of a 1 kiloton atomic bomb. No radiation, & far less thermal output, but far easier to assemble, too.
500 tons of TNT = 1/2 kiloton yield, & there were plenty of battlefield nukes with yields like that.
Cover your top deck with a cargo of industrial twine rolls, like the Grandcamp had, but soak 'em in fuel oil from your own fuel bunkers, & they will rain down on a target city like a million firebombs.
Cover the deck with barrels of chlorine pool chemicals in powder form, & you have a fairly effective chemical attack, too.
Bos, thanks for spelling it out for the unfamiliar. It’s for this reason that I have no sympathy whatsoever for terrorists and their supporters. Too many lives are at stake to do anything but wipe the suckers out ASAP.
