Big Boom Beirut.

Saw it on the news, looks like it’s an explosives warehouse.

Sorry guys I was in the middle of posting when you wrote your contributions. I will delete my post.

The video of the explosion in the port of Beirut scared the pants off me. link

Purely guessing but it had the appearance of a 0.25Kt bomb blast following a nearby fire. As it was a single blast I doubt if it were a munitions store, but rather an LPG  BLEVE (fuel-air explosion). This is the sort of event which gives all fire-fighters sphincter cramp or brown trousers. My thoughts go out to all the families involved as the death toll must surely be in the 100s, and damage to property huge.

The cause of the explosion is unknown at this time, but I suspect cock-up rather than Israeli/US action/sabotage.

btw the satellite view of the port shows what looks like half a dozen LPG 500 tonne spheres

Wow, look at that shock wave !

The closest thing I’ve seen to that was a train tanker carrying liquid propane gas exploding in a fire.

The report that it was a sodium nitrate explosion  is definitely not the whole story. Without a ‘fuel’, sodium nitrate is almost completely inert, It is even quite hard to make it detonate using heat alone. However mix it with something like solvents or a flammable gas and it is as dangerous as hell.

Looking at the Guardian clip there is the characteristic orange ‘smoke’ of nitrogen dioxide immediately before the explosion, so sodium nitrate was probably involved but something else supplied the fuel which caused it to detonate.

This article confirms my suspicion that a lot of other things must have gone wrong at the same time.

It looks a lot like a reprise of the 500 ton Tianjin explosion in which a fuel (acetylene) accidentally became mixed with the fertilizer. Tianjin is thought to have been  caused by firefighters at an adjacent fire mistakenly spraying water over calcium carbide containers.

Looks like the first explosion was something to do with a fireworks store by the flashes going off, then after a while boom! That also explains why so many caught it on camera.

The aftermath reminds me of the photos of Hiroshima.

I suppose gun powder would proved quite a good fuel for a sodium nitrate explosion and it does look like they had a firework factory explosion first.

Actually the latest Beeb video taken from a high angle shows lightning flashes in the ‘smoke’ of the initial fire. To me that suggests a very high particle density in the smoke, so grain dust may indeed be a factor. The lightning would also give enough energy to initiate a potent detonation wave.

The many different video clips will provide enough detail for a pretty good analysis of what initiated the explosion and enable any Cubans to be spotted I suspect that the Beirut explosion will form a text-book example for future University Fire Risk courses.

The linked Guardian article shows that the root cause of the disaster was bureaucratic cock-up and inept organisation rather than terrorist conspiracy.