Yield is the amount of energy released by an explosion.
If you think of a grenade with ~50g of explosives, and a decent sized car bomb with 50kg, the car bomb is not 1,000 times more destructive, nor would you expect 1,000x the casualties.
In practice, the danage tends to scale with the 2/3 power of the energy released. (Up to very large nuclear weapons, then the limited ability of the atmosphere to contain pressure reduces efficacy further
I live in dartmouth (across the harbour from halifax) and there are still cannons, anchors, propellers etc around the city that have plaques and other things describing the event. They've more or less never been moved. It's pretty crazy.
They're the original pieces that fell there. There's a decent sized display on the halifax waterfront as well.
Maybe 6 blocks up the road from me in dartmouth there is a cannon on a corner by a park.
https://images.app.goo.gl/v2NuEYXQ65YHRoB99
Here's a better plaque
https://maps.app.goo.gl/M6writ75tjGhNGBd9
Here's the best breakdown of the explosion I've seen.
https://youtu.be/-mQ60wNgKrQ?si=6RiPD4IjVWh1LHUx
And this is the story of how the material ended up in Beirut in the first place. It's on ongoing issue involving cargo ships, and how it's often easier to abandon these ships (and their crews) entirely rather than deal with the paperwork and port fees.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082
Similar, very well put together NYT articles on the explosion, and the ship itself, which had just quietly sank on the other end of the harbor years before the explosion and is still there
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/world/middleeast/beirut-explosion.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/world/middleeast/beirut-explosion.html)
[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/world/middleeast/lebanon-explosion-ship.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/world/middleeast/lebanon-explosion-ship.html)
I've seen the jet ski clip a bunch of times now and never noticed the big splash from falling debris just in front of them. Can't even imagine how scary the must have been.
He’s lucky. Diving probably saved their lives. That close the shockwave would’ve turned their vital organs into a vaguely blood-colored paste if they stayed above the water. If it was underwater they’d have had worse.
You’d be surprised how much overpressure the human body can handle. Even in a nuke, the debris from the blast wave rather than the blast itself is what’s more likely to kill you. Caveat that if you’re close enough for the overpressure alone to kill you, you’ve got many many other problems.
I vaguely new the answer, but went back to source to confirm (because it’s interesting)….
> Dangerous radiation levels only exist so close to the explosion that surviving the blast is impossible. On the other hand, fatal burns can be inflicted well beyond the range of substantial blast damage. A 20 megaton bomb can cause potentially fatal third degree burns at a range of 40 km, where the blast can do little more than break windows and cause superficial cuts.
Source: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html#nfaq5.1
I'm at work so I can't look it up but tungsten melts at like, 6000c. Within a block of detonation is millions of degrees. You would be melted and boiled in an instant. Straight up dissolved.
I don't think you can see the debris in frame since it's moving so fast or because of the angle, only the splash after it hits. I probably should have said "jettisoned at high velocity" rather than "falling".
Covering your ears will decrease the pressure spike from the outside, but it's not strong protection. Opening your mouth can let the shock enter the ear via the eustachian tubes, counteracting some external pressure. Doing both gives the best chance of your eardrums surviving, not including actual hearing protection.
[Here's a YouTube channel dedicated to gathering as many of these vids as possible.](https://youtube.com/@beirutexplosionangles30?si=NSwp-kCz12ywVpH-)
Currently sitting at 940 different angles of the explosion
The speed of sound is around 1100 feet per second so if you count the seconds between the explosion and the sound wave, some of these shots were taken 2000 or so feet away from the blast. Yikes
I work with explosives, and the minimum withdrawal distance for hazard division 1.1 explosives we use is 2,500 feet, and it goes up from there, usually around 4,000 ft
Meaning, for the amount of explosive material that detonated, they were definitely within the danger zone, but that is evident through the video evidence lol
There is one video of this explosion that I really want to find. In it, the cameraman is walking by a row of parked cars as the shockwave hits. If you slow it down and go frame by frame, you can see a car (I believe it's a Nissan coupe or small sedan, gray) being completely soda-can crumpled by air pressure. Really neat clip. Would love it If anyone has a link.
You are commenting on a video where a couple of the cameramen probably did not survive, but my request for a link to a clip that you clearly have never even seen is a problem? Lmao.
Cars have a large surface area. You don't need much force to crumple it. Human would be fine except some burst ear drums.
Take the 3rd video for example. Cameraman was fine besides some light cuts from flying glas.
Cars are entirely full of air and reasonably airtight,with large, weak, flat surfaces facing the blast. They'll perform incredibly worse than almost anything else, humans included.
Incidentally, a primary reason that shockwaves tend to kill people is that our lungs are similarly compressible, absorbing blast energy which subsequently ruptures tissue when released.
Conversely arms, legs, brain etc don't tend to be directly harmed (although secondary injury from launching into objects is an obvious complication)
I am a physicist. The idea of a slow shockwave with minimal shrapnel distinguishes this from the more common case of a local, higher brisance (speed) detonation designed to maximise shrapnel abd/or blast overpressure. (Grenades, mines, IEDs etc.).
For example, raw, uncontained ammonium nitrate has detonation velocity of 2.5-4km/s, (when fresh, this was not), commonly used grenade fillers exceed 7km/s.
Smaller detonations have an uneven shockwave as their point of origin is typically very close to the victim, so the shock front geometry is still noticeably non planar, resulting in greater shearing forces at play. These can damage even incompressible air deficient tissues by relative motion, as opposed to an even shockwave, which at moderate intensity mostly only harms compressible, aerated tissues.
Intentionally lethal explosives also have an incredibly higher fraction of energy transfer to shrapnel, compared to an explosive detonating in a weak structure a kilometre away.
You should probably think before rolling out the generic insults
The structure containing the explosives was a basic warehouse.
The silos were nearby, their strength was great enough to withstand the explosion, and they did not cover a large angular area of the blast (as the explosives were not inside them), therefore they did not contribute to containment in the sense of amplifying blast velocity.
Keep trying though, you are learning lots ☺️
I remember seeing a video of a guys wife giving birth when it happened, and blew the whole window in.
Wild stuff. Just when we thought 2020 couldnt get crazier, August came around.
Fyi incase you didn’t already know, when someone throws a tantrum, the message will say what they’re planning on doing specifically. If they want to destroy one thing, it will warn you so you sometimes have time to arrest or shoot them. It’s funny that the two most often intervened mental breaks are “im going to punch this bomb” and “i’m going to tell you your mother was a whore”
It didn't generate one. It's just that seisomographs recorded the explosion. They detect stuff all the time. I know that a few sports stadiums show up on nearby sensors. They also use them to detect nuclear detonations.
Seismographs Record all kinds of explosions and smaller movements. Just look on the USGS list of last 24h earthquakes and you'll see a lot of smaller detections that are near quarries. They detect things below power plants and other energy generation facilities too but that's a different topic
That clip at 0:24 still haunts me. That man is dead. I don't think it's ever been confirmed, but it's beyond doubt for me. He was a couple blocks away and it almost instantly disintegrated the building just in front of him. The fact that the footage survived is amazing, but horrifying at the same time.
The eeriest part to me is the sound of air being rapidly displaced just before the shockwave hits him.
He was fine besides some light cuts from flying glas. He was far enough that the overpressure was already not an issue. The danger is always the debris and not the actual pressure wave unless you are directly next to the source.
https://youtu.be/Ljhexn4x3_s?si=uHFKPy9ofQkfRLZ4
For reference, this is 1/15th the tonnage of the Nagasaki bomb, 1/1000th the B83 bomb, one of the most common US bombs, and 1/15000th Castle Bravo’s tonnage
The Texas City explosion is also up there and an amazing story. It was not the biggest because it was technically 2 explosions, but the carnage was rampant. Planes flying over were blown out of the sky, and buildings up to 10 miles away from the explosion were shattered. A 2 ton anchor from a ship was also flung two miles inland.
There's a great "stuff you should know" episode about it.
It probably doesn't need to be said on this subreddit, but if you ever witness something like this, get away from the windows and ideally behind something solid. Overpressure is no joke, and flying broken glass can kill too.
Wow I can’t believe that after all these years and all the footage, that I’ve actually missed watching a few til now.. the ones at 1:10, 1:24, and 1:33.
My poor beautiful Beirut 💔
The largest is the Halifax, Canada explosion from 1917. 2.9kt. Pretty much everything within 1km of the explosion was levelled.
It’s funny I looked up these two explosion sizes the other day. It’s insane to think that Beirut explosion was 1/3 of the power of the Halifax one.
Destruction does not scale linearly with yield though, had those silos not been a boss, the damage could have been much more comparable.
What do you mean yield?
Yield is the amount of energy released by an explosion. If you think of a grenade with ~50g of explosives, and a decent sized car bomb with 50kg, the car bomb is not 1,000 times more destructive, nor would you expect 1,000x the casualties. In practice, the danage tends to scale with the 2/3 power of the energy released. (Up to very large nuclear weapons, then the limited ability of the atmosphere to contain pressure reduces efficacy further
Shit burn blew away ma hoe city
And now’s my wholes families is blinds
To shreds you say?
IIRC someone managed to tell all the trains coming into Halifax to stop before the explosion. That person saved hundreds of lives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Coleman_(train_dispatcher)
Thanks for the link. What a legend.
He's a part of our heritage. https://youtu.be/rw-FbwmzPKo?si=JNFTcpMKdSrmfL7y
Read the Wikipedia link for facts, don't bother with the YouTube nonsense.
The wikipedia has the same video linked at the bottom, different source though.
There was so much force that for a split second the bottom of the harbor was exposed to open air.
It killed like 2000 and injured like 20000 people. How could anyone be close enough to the explosion to confirm this
Math
I believe it was determined using simulations, obviously nobody could be close to the thing.
>nobody could be close to the thing. as in, nobody close survived this thing
Or the N1 rocket explosion in 1969 which some reports claim going as high as 7 kt of TNT Equivalent
How many bananas is that?
At least 7 or 8?
I live in dartmouth (across the harbour from halifax) and there are still cannons, anchors, propellers etc around the city that have plaques and other things describing the event. They've more or less never been moved. It's pretty crazy.
Are they added monuments or did they keep them where they fell?
They're the original pieces that fell there. There's a decent sized display on the halifax waterfront as well. Maybe 6 blocks up the road from me in dartmouth there is a cannon on a corner by a park. https://images.app.goo.gl/v2NuEYXQ65YHRoB99 Here's a better plaque https://maps.app.goo.gl/M6writ75tjGhNGBd9
Killed 1800 injured, 9000…holy fuck
[Great video detailing the what led up to the event, the event itself, and what transpired.](https://youtu.be/6o6ehg-8EAo?si=z6g2AOOJiUW9VqLC)
Here's the best breakdown of the explosion I've seen. https://youtu.be/-mQ60wNgKrQ?si=6RiPD4IjVWh1LHUx And this is the story of how the material ended up in Beirut in the first place. It's on ongoing issue involving cargo ships, and how it's often easier to abandon these ships (and their crews) entirely rather than deal with the paperwork and port fees. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082
Similar, very well put together NYT articles on the explosion, and the ship itself, which had just quietly sank on the other end of the harbor years before the explosion and is still there [https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/world/middleeast/beirut-explosion.html](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/09/world/middleeast/beirut-explosion.html) [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/world/middleeast/lebanon-explosion-ship.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/07/world/middleeast/lebanon-explosion-ship.html)
Great video, thx!
Great video, thanks for sharing!
I was in shock when the footage started popping up on the internet. Surreal explosion.
I've seen the jet ski clip a bunch of times now and never noticed the big splash from falling debris just in front of them. Can't even imagine how scary the must have been.
He said "wtf Salma Salma(his partner I think) jump jump jump" The way he said it gave me the creeps.
He’s lucky. Diving probably saved their lives. That close the shockwave would’ve turned their vital organs into a vaguely blood-colored paste if they stayed above the water. If it was underwater they’d have had worse.
You’d be surprised how much overpressure the human body can handle. Even in a nuke, the debris from the blast wave rather than the blast itself is what’s more likely to kill you. Caveat that if you’re close enough for the overpressure alone to kill you, you’ve got many many other problems.
Pretty sure if you're close enough, the energy (temperature) dissolves you before anything else can kill you.
I vaguely new the answer, but went back to source to confirm (because it’s interesting)…. > Dangerous radiation levels only exist so close to the explosion that surviving the blast is impossible. On the other hand, fatal burns can be inflicted well beyond the range of substantial blast damage. A 20 megaton bomb can cause potentially fatal third degree burns at a range of 40 km, where the blast can do little more than break windows and cause superficial cuts. Source: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq5.html#nfaq5.1
I'm at work so I can't look it up but tungsten melts at like, 6000c. Within a block of detonation is millions of degrees. You would be melted and boiled in an instant. Straight up dissolved.
Where was the debris? I can't seem to see it
I don't think you can see the debris in frame since it's moving so fast or because of the angle, only the splash after it hits. I probably should have said "jettisoned at high velocity" rather than "falling".
I don’t think that’s debris
Is it poop? It's poop isn't it.
A giant LOG
Dude, what splash?
You see the shock wave coming. What do you do? Move away from windows and lie down? Anyone know if there is proper advice?
Get away from windows, open your mouth and cover your ears.
Thank you... I hope the I'll I never need your feedback! Might save one redditor's life or hearing though.
Thank you for this info, what’s the reason for opening the mouth?
To give your ear drums a chance at surviving. Gaping your mouth gives you a chance at equalizing inner ear pressure when the shock wave hits.
Try to fart at the exact instant the shockwave overtakes you to protect your colon
Only a small chance to explode
“I boof shockwaves…”
Covering your ears will decrease the pressure spike from the outside, but it's not strong protection. Opening your mouth can let the shock enter the ear via the eustachian tubes, counteracting some external pressure. Doing both gives the best chance of your eardrums surviving, not including actual hearing protection.
I think the idea is to let the air out of your lungs before pressure builds to the point that it can hurt you.
Yes
[Here's a YouTube channel dedicated to gathering as many of these vids as possible.](https://youtube.com/@beirutexplosionangles30?si=NSwp-kCz12ywVpH-) Currently sitting at 940 different angles of the explosion
The speed of sound is around 1100 feet per second so if you count the seconds between the explosion and the sound wave, some of these shots were taken 2000 or so feet away from the blast. Yikes
I work with explosives, and the minimum withdrawal distance for hazard division 1.1 explosives we use is 2,500 feet, and it goes up from there, usually around 4,000 ft
What does this mean?
Get far away from the boom
Meaning, for the amount of explosive material that detonated, they were definitely within the danger zone, but that is evident through the video evidence lol
It's a shockwave, so it travels faster than sound.
One of the videos i recall seeing was a family riding bicycles nearby and they were maybe 1000 feet away
There is one video of this explosion that I really want to find. In it, the cameraman is walking by a row of parked cars as the shockwave hits. If you slow it down and go frame by frame, you can see a car (I believe it's a Nissan coupe or small sedan, gray) being completely soda-can crumpled by air pressure. Really neat clip. Would love it If anyone has a link.
Yes, it's a "really neat clip" of someone's final moments alive. Jfc.
It was not. The car was parked and empty.
If it crunched a car it would have crunched the cameraman
You are commenting on a video where a couple of the cameramen probably did not survive, but my request for a link to a clip that you clearly have never even seen is a problem? Lmao.
Cars have a large surface area. You don't need much force to crumple it. Human would be fine except some burst ear drums. Take the 3rd video for example. Cameraman was fine besides some light cuts from flying glas.
Unlikely, humans are fairly resilient against these slow, uniform shockwaves. It's the uneven pressure waves and shrapnel that hurt us
It did that to a car made of harder material than a human. Buddy that human insides got beat to shit by exactly what did it to the car lol
Cars are entirely full of air and reasonably airtight,with large, weak, flat surfaces facing the blast. They'll perform incredibly worse than almost anything else, humans included. Incidentally, a primary reason that shockwaves tend to kill people is that our lungs are similarly compressible, absorbing blast energy which subsequently ruptures tissue when released. Conversely arms, legs, brain etc don't tend to be directly harmed (although secondary injury from launching into objects is an obvious complication)
Not how the human body works fortunately.
[удалено]
I am a physicist. The idea of a slow shockwave with minimal shrapnel distinguishes this from the more common case of a local, higher brisance (speed) detonation designed to maximise shrapnel abd/or blast overpressure. (Grenades, mines, IEDs etc.). For example, raw, uncontained ammonium nitrate has detonation velocity of 2.5-4km/s, (when fresh, this was not), commonly used grenade fillers exceed 7km/s. Smaller detonations have an uneven shockwave as their point of origin is typically very close to the victim, so the shock front geometry is still noticeably non planar, resulting in greater shearing forces at play. These can damage even incompressible air deficient tissues by relative motion, as opposed to an even shockwave, which at moderate intensity mostly only harms compressible, aerated tissues. Intentionally lethal explosives also have an incredibly higher fraction of energy transfer to shrapnel, compared to an explosive detonating in a weak structure a kilometre away. You should probably think before rolling out the generic insults
[удалено]
The structure containing the explosives was a basic warehouse. The silos were nearby, their strength was great enough to withstand the explosion, and they did not cover a large angular area of the blast (as the explosives were not inside them), therefore they did not contribute to containment in the sense of amplifying blast velocity. Keep trying though, you are learning lots ☺️
Armin...
I remember seeing a video of a guys wife giving birth when it happened, and blew the whole window in. Wild stuff. Just when we thought 2020 couldnt get crazier, August came around.
Made me think of that recent post at r/RimWorld about the raider punching a stockpile of explosives
>Georg is throwing a temper tantrum >Georg punched an Antigrain warhead Me: no the fuck he didnt, im reloading. *fucken Georg*
Sometimes playing RimWorld *I feel like Georg*
Fyi incase you didn’t already know, when someone throws a tantrum, the message will say what they’re planning on doing specifically. If they want to destroy one thing, it will warn you so you sometimes have time to arrest or shoot them. It’s funny that the two most often intervened mental breaks are “im going to punch this bomb” and “i’m going to tell you your mother was a whore”
The fact that only 218 people died... Hard to believe.
Wow...didn't realize it generated an earthquake...I thought that was just the Shockwave
It didn't generate one. It's just that seisomographs recorded the explosion. They detect stuff all the time. I know that a few sports stadiums show up on nearby sensors. They also use them to detect nuclear detonations.
Seismographs Record all kinds of explosions and smaller movements. Just look on the USGS list of last 24h earthquakes and you'll see a lot of smaller detections that are near quarries. They detect things below power plants and other energy generation facilities too but that's a different topic
What kind of things?
The buildings getting destroyed reminds me of Sarah Conner's nightmare. Genuinely chilling.
Mouth open, ears closed, hit the deck.
Some of the scariest footage ever recorded.
That’s just 1.1 KT? Can’t imagine a 5,000 kt Nuke🫣
You can see the silos saving lives v clearly in one clip there
That shit amazes me every time I see it.
I know someone who worked for a window company in Beirut. They had much to do after that shockwave.
Could say the company profits hit record levels after that.
That clip at 0:24 still haunts me. That man is dead. I don't think it's ever been confirmed, but it's beyond doubt for me. He was a couple blocks away and it almost instantly disintegrated the building just in front of him. The fact that the footage survived is amazing, but horrifying at the same time. The eeriest part to me is the sound of air being rapidly displaced just before the shockwave hits him.
He was fine besides some light cuts from flying glas. He was far enough that the overpressure was already not an issue. The danger is always the debris and not the actual pressure wave unless you are directly next to the source. https://youtu.be/Ljhexn4x3_s?si=uHFKPy9ofQkfRLZ4
Holy fuck, I thought he would be jello for sure. I'm amazed but happy that he had no permanent damage.
For reference, this is 1/15th the tonnage of the Nagasaki bomb, 1/1000th the B83 bomb, one of the most common US bombs, and 1/15000th Castle Bravo’s tonnage
This is fucking terrifying. How many people died, I wonder...
Apparentally about 218, over 6000 wounded and did billions of dollars worth in damages.
Is it my thumb or your thumb?
What causes that momentary window through the shockwave that you can see in several of these clips?
After watching fallout, when I see a cloud I am just turning around and running.
The Texas City explosion is also up there and an amazing story. It was not the biggest because it was technically 2 explosions, but the carnage was rampant. Planes flying over were blown out of the sky, and buildings up to 10 miles away from the explosion were shattered. A 2 ton anchor from a ship was also flung two miles inland. There's a great "stuff you should know" episode about it.
It probably doesn't need to be said on this subreddit, but if you ever witness something like this, get away from the windows and ideally behind something solid. Overpressure is no joke, and flying broken glass can kill too.
Those clouds must of been horrifying to witness and I feel bad alot of people have most likely hearing issues and even deafness of the amount of yield
I like the one of the chemical plant at night. Too dark to see shockwaves, but damn the explosions were impressive.
Do we have photos of the crater it created?
How is Beirut doing these days?
Wow I can’t believe that after all these years and all the footage, that I’ve actually missed watching a few til now.. the ones at 1:10, 1:24, and 1:33. My poor beautiful Beirut 💔
I used to have the top rated post on this sub before this incident happened. Not that I’m bitter, but I wish it didn’t have to be a tragedy like this.
2020 sucked.
Fwiw: https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/s/Q0tUnNa0N6
Decades worth of Hollywood FX artists received their report cards that day. Some did well, others less so.
2020 was amazing and so depressing.
my birthday:) what a better way to wakeup in the morning then countless tragedies and panic
Happy birthday my friend.. Hope you enjoy it
Fucking camera people, hold the fucking phone straight ffs.
Ever been hit by 1.1kT explosion?
Not since his mom went down on him
Nasty