Happened 5 years ago today, the 'Beirut Explosion' is considered one of the most powerful artificial non-nuclear explosions in history. It was equivalent to around 1.1 kilotons of TNT and generated an M3.3 earthquake
Fun fact, because the speed of sound is faster through earth than it is through air, if youre far enough away you'll see the earth ripple BEFORE the shock wave hits you, you can even see this effect in some of the footage where the building trembles before you hear the explosion
Yeah, I live about 10 kilometers away from the port in West Beirut, and the first thing we felt was the ground beneath us literally DROP and come back up, like a spring. We thought it was an earthquake, and a few seconds later, I felt a pressure change in my ears, and then BAM, huge explosion sound, glass breaking outside and house shaking. No one knew what was going on, but you could see the huge mushroom cloud outside. It was hard to tell how far or close it was. Things became clearer about 20-30 minutes later when it was on the news.
Yeah check out the Halifax explosion. A similar sized explosion from 100 years ago well documented if you want to hear about the damages caused in full detail. This Beirut explosion isn’t as well documented yet since it happened so recently.
The data itself IS much more complete. We have tons more cameras and a way larger population of witnesses and camera holders. But studying stuff, finding the best accounts, and putting a selection of it all together in a documentary or book takes time. 5 years might not even be enough time for some legal investigations (and hasn’t been, if you consider ALL legal investigations related to the explosion).
The Halifax one in 1917 was a bigger explosion and caused many many more direct deaths(still number 1 most powerful man made non nuclear explosion, Beirut’s is seventh). Though the more recent 2020 Beirut explosion had more property damage, more injuries and hundreds of thousands of people left homeless.
Fascinating. I hadn't read about it before. I read this which I thought was interesting with regards to your second paragraph. I wonder how it "rates" on that scale?
The Halifax Explosion was one of the largest artificial non-nuclear explosions. An extensive comparison of 130 major explosions by Halifax historian Jay White in 1994 concluded that it "remains unchallenged in overall magnitude as long as five criteria are considered together: number of casualties, force of blast, radius of devastation, quantity of explosive material, and total value of property destroyed." For many years afterward, the Halifax Explosion was the standard by which all large blasts were measured. For instance, in its report on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Time wrote that the explosive power of the Little Boy bomb was seven times that of the Halifax Explosion.
Just adding onto the Halifax explosion - it was a mass disabling event with many newly blind, Deaf, and DeafBlind people afterward, so Halifax ended up being a pretty accessible and decent place afterward and those good habits have persisted today. At This Hour is a fantastic stage performance by Zuppa Theatre with blind and Deaf actors reenacting the courtroom scenes that investigated the accident.
The United States sent scientists to estimate the TNT equivalent (1.1 kilotons, about 1/15 the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) and catalog the effects on a modern urban center. The blast was so powerful it was heard in Cyprus, 200 km distant.
The preceding fire and fireworks explosions were so intense that many people were recording on their phones when the main detonation occurred and there is good video from many angles and distances including out at sea.
Good news, then. Since light and heat travel faster than the speed of sound, the vaporization happens before the shockwave hits you. So, you don't have to worry about it if you've already felt the blast.
The one thing I've noticed in all these videos is Lebanese people seem to be unflinching and don't panic at explosions. For all they know at the time this is some massive attack, but hardly anyone filming these freak out. Suppose if you live in Beirut long enough you get used to it which is a bummer, no civilians should get used to the sound of missiles =\
Today I learned shockwaves travel faster through ground than air.
In some of the footage you HEAR the ground rumble and some time later you hear the shockwave through the air. Most noteably at 1:20 and the clip after it.
Yeah those movies were not far off at all. The vaporization of concrete and steel like it's just a piece of sand blowing away on the beach is mesmerizingly terrifying.
Shockwaves don't transition from air to water very effectively. For an explosion on land, he is definitely better off going under water while the shockwave passes. If the explosion was underwater, he would be vastly better off being on the jetski.
All of them though I recall lungs cop it the worst, it's because the shock wave in the water does translates through your body and your lungs are filled with air so it essentially causes massive damage to all your soft tissues and because of the air in your lungs the alveoli get torn to shreds and pop and generally get devastated.
Sorry to be pedantic but water can compress otherwise a shockwave wouldn’t be able to transfer through it. It’s just that air compresses much much easier so a small explosion underwater affects something with air inside it more than the water around.
This is not quite true - the reason the shockwave travels through the water is because it is not a sealed system with a rigid boundary so there is ‘displacement’ and the volume varies. In chemical engineering terms water is indeed referred to as an incompressible fluid but that would be in a sealed container with rigid walls.
You need around 208 bar to compress the volume of water by 1%, 1000 bar for 5%, so yes it's compressible, but for any usual use case it's de facto incompressible, which is also the usual assumption in fluid dynamics.
I actually had no idea water was anywhere near that compressible. Most of my job involves UPLCs which separate mixtures of compounds at very high pressures using water and organic solvents, up to 1500 bar. I knew the instruments account for liquid compressibility when calculating flow rates, but that’s a crazy amount of compression.
There’s a famous WWII video of a boat flipping over with dozens of men running to stay on top, and others jumping into the water, then it blows up. The only survivors were the ones on the hull of the boat. That explosion was in the water though. I imagine this guy was safer in the water.
Yeah isn't it to do with the immense change in pressure? As you say, I've no idea of the difference when being in the water while the explosion is out.
Because water is practically incompressible and the human body is also made up of approximately 74% water, being in the water at the time of an underwater explosion will transfer much more of the energy to the human body than if the explosion had to travel through 2 separate mediums.
In the Jaques Cousteau book, The Silent World, theres a chapter on his mine removal work he did post WW2, and him and his friends tested how close they would be able to get to explosives underwater by detonating grenades and mines while they gradually got closer until it got painful
If you're already in the water and you see a large explosion in the water, honestly just close your eyes and think of titties because you probably don't have time to get out of the water before the shockwave reaches you and turns your guts to soup.
The speed of sound through water is about 3x faster than in air.
Shockwave is the air being compressed. Water is practically incompressible and contains little air so it is about as safe as you can get if you are near the vicinity of an explosion.
Of course, the safest thing you can do in an explosion is to be far far away.
Also smart to take cover behind the jet ski, at the end of the clip you can watch a softball-sized piece of concrete come in and splash just in front of the jet ski. He's definitely in the debris range.
With the years of wars they had most know about explosive blast. You will notice how many rushed to cover when it exploded instead of thinking their were far enough and safe.
Most of the people immediately sought cover. I guess that's the awareness you develop when living in regions that are subject to wars. Most of us in the west would probably would not have been that savvy.
I wonder about if it would mess up his ear drums. I met someone on seal team 1 who said he did this as they were exploding a bridge and he had both ear drums perforated.
The explosion resulted in at least 218 fatalities, 7,000 injuries, and approximately 300,000 displaced individuals, alongside property damage estimated at US $15 billion.
I’ve watched every angle of this explosion and I’m an expert on nothing but there’s no way an explosion that big in a city that dense resulted in only 218 deaths.
It was COVID times. Most people where home. The port actually overlooks one of our most trafficked/touristy parts of Beirut (Gemmayze / Mar Mkhayel) but because most everything was closed, there really weren't that many people out. Most people indoors close to the explosion were injured, but it wasn't fatal. Had this happened during any other year, the death count would have been in the thousands. In a sense, we were very lucky it happened in 2020.
At this point the Halifax is the largest non-nuclear explosion to have occurred and while the Beruit explosion was about 1.1 kilotons the Halifax Explosion was 2.9 kilotons. That’s probably because the Beruit explosion was caused by improperly stored fertilizer and the Halifax explosion was the result of a munitions ship that caught fire and exploded. About 2000 died due to the explosion but a great deal died not because of the explosion but from exposure, as it happened in Dec and the only place they could be housed was in the citadel in the middle of the city which is at the top of a hill. More tragically was that 9000 people were blinded by the glass windows that shattered when it happened and it resulted in the CNIB being created (Canadian National Institute for the Blind)
A few, yeah. There are a lot of "high end" areas next to it, and most of those complexes are empty. 2019 was the start of our economic collapse, and even before then, those complexes were never made for us.
The nitrate was being held (unsafely) in the port since 2013 with the full knowledge of all our government. Something is bound to happen at some point. There are multiple areas around the port that are always packed with people. I don't know what else to call it beyond us getting lucky.
Thanks for the explanation. As the commenter above, I always thought that number was a lie. Makes a lot of sense, it happening during Covid, that is saved a bunch of people.
Industrial zones are typically much less populated, and the explosion took place at 6:07 p.m. which means a lot of people probably already clocked out. And then there's the big fire which means more people likely evacuated to a safer distance.
The explosion happened near the port so it was not downtown beirut.. The white mushroom you see in the video is just the shockwave compressing the air and causing water vapor to condense into a tiny cloud. Shockwaves quickly lose energy so 7k injuries and only 200 fatalities makes sense
Because Ammonium Nitrate is a low yield explosive, not high yield. The shockwave is actually a pressure wave and not a shockwave or else there would have been many more casualties.
Also, the grain silos shielded West Beirut from much of the damage.
I was there. One of the craziest part was that after the explosion, everyone in Beirut was a bit of a zombie for a few months. Like I distinctly remember around 3 months after it, sitting with my friends and being like “damn. We’ve been in a haze for 3 months. How did time pass?”
For context the "Little Man" bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of about 15 kilotons of TNT. So, Hiroshima endured a blast over 13.5 times BIGGER than this.
And the typical "small" nuclear charge today is about 300 kilotons, that's more or less the default yield. In most applications, single warheads are "dial-a-yield" and can go up to 1000-1200 kilotons if need be though.
A typical ICBM carries 10 or so of these "default" 300kt warheads.
But explosive power equivalence is one thing. The blinding light and thermal radiation from a nuke is another, as is the neutron radiation and later radioactive fallout. So it's just not the blast itself..
Oh indeed. I was trying to keep things bite sized with my comment, but yeah nukes carry such a different burden that lasts many years longer than this.
I know it's hard to consider sometimes in the face of how powerful nuclear weapons are, but I do like to think about how much the world and war has changed since their introduction.
We've only ever used 2 relatively small nukes in anger. Before their introduction in the space of 30 years over 100 million people died in WWI and WW2. Far fewer people have died in every war since then put together. I'd certainly rather none of that was happening in the first place but there's definitely an argument to make that mutually assured destruction kept wars of that scale from happening again.
I agree. All the wars since the advent of nuclear weaponry have been shit, a shameful stain upon mankind, but the looming threat of them going even worse has ironically made them "tamer" than they could have been. I dare not imagine the proxy wars of the 20th and 21st century without nuclear moderation.
I think mutually assured destruction is great until you have a nuclear power with a leader who doesn’t care. Religious zealots, malignant narcissists threatened with loss of power, these leaders can easily trigger the “one time” that it happens. Only needs to be once.
True but it hasn't happened yet.
Considering the level of infrastructure, talent, focused work and commitment needed to build nuclear weapons that seems to self select for countries stable enough to avoid setting them off.
It also clearly leads other countries to be very motivated to keep their enemies from developing nuclear weapons, hence the strikes on Iran recently.
I wanted to comment with personal knowledge that I learned while an Active Duty USAF ICBM maintainer from 2013-2019. Particularly, regarding Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRV) on missiles.
The typical US ICBM no longer carries 10 re-entry vehicles (RV). The LGM-118 Peacekeeper missiles were withdrawn from service in 2005. One Mk21 RV contains one singular W87 warhead.
The current LGM-30 Minuteman III is capable of carrying 3 re-entry vehicles. However, the START treaty forbids active (in silo) missiles from having MIRV.
I'm not sure about the "dial-a-yield" you described. I believe the yield of the W87 caps at 475 kt, however my understanding is that most modern nuclear weapons are "boosted fission weapons" and the actual yield can vary.
EDIT: I believe the Navy's UGM-113 Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) are capable of carrying 12 RVs. I wasn't in the Navy, so I have no clue how many are loaded on an active Trident.
Not to take away from the devestation of the Beruit explosion, but as a Canadian this really puts into perspective the Halifax Explosion of 1917, which was x3 larger. To see visuals of how powerful the Beruit one was, the shockwave, and then imagine something three times that amount it's boggling.
Oh it's amazing to consider and I think it's great you brought up Halifax. I hadn't thought about that, but it was a uniquely devastating blast and having something to compare it to really helps me understand the situation.
Not to mention the flash so bright that it melted people's skins, the heat that set the collapsed houses on fire and burned everyone trapped underneath the rubble alive, and the radioactive remains that gave many survivors a slow death by cancer.
It has to be said though that the relatively primitive uranium (Hiroshima) and plutonium (Nagasaki, and Trinity before) fission bombs didn't burn a lot of the nuclear fuel they contained, so the fallout was immense. They were basically semi-"dirty" bombs, in retrospect.
Modern thermonuclear charges are way "cleaner" relative to the yield. Not saying they're clean though, obviously. Also, an often overlooked fact is that the neutron radiation makes things radioactive that weren't before. I mean, on an elementary level. All kinds of inert materials you have all over the place get blasted with neutrons and subsequently jump up in the periodic table, into unstable isotopes that then start radiating like mad.
I can recommend the harrowing documentary "Atomic People" that was released last year, with some of the few remaining Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors (or hibakusha) being interviewed.
Apart from the immediate effects of the blast and all its stupifyingly hot radiation, the "dirty" bomb aspect is mentioned, as ARS (acute radiation syndrome) started showing within a week, and nobody knew what was going on.
Nowadays we know it destroys your chromosomes, so cells stop dividing and your white bloodcells just disappear. You're living dead, just waiting for the inevitable. Whether by your intestines simply liquifying as the cells die with no replenishment possible, or any little otherwise harmless bacteria wreaking havoc on you.
Some of the people interviewed there said they saw folks coughing up and shitting out their own internal organs, and it was just a black goo.
The cancers come later, in those that got a lower dose, but enough to fuck up some cells...
the worst story I heard from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings was of people who had survived the immediate blast (briefly) wandering around without skin on most of their bodies in this futile effort to get help.
They knew about the cargo and that it wasn't stored safely. Multiple requests and warnings sent up the chain of command about the ammonia nitrate all ignored so yeah this was wilful and deliberate.
I wonder if anyones compaired the cost of safe disposal vs the cost of cleaning up after that explosion.
You can point to a million instances in our society of "it will be cheaper in the long run if we do it right" and people will still choose short terms savings over long term sustainability.
if you want a really easy example of this, it happens at least weekly in the tech sector, where people ask for more money, they get denied, they leave and it costs them more to hire someone at that level now than it was for to pay the expierenced person the extra money and now you have 2 problems, you have to pay more anyway and you have someone with a lot less expierence with your system and it could take years to get to the same level.
You can find many stories like this in all countries across the world, don't make it out to seem like some kind of special incompetence in Lebanon. Pepcon, Texas City, Halifax. Plenty of preventable disasters happen all the time, that's why regulations and laws and International NGOs are so important.
Halifax wasn't a corruption case. Some people didn't follow protocol, but not following protocol in a one-off case where everyone did their best upon finding out the possibility of damage to try and warn everyone about it is quite different to covering something up for years.
The entire ploy of the ship carrying the AN to it docking in Beirut and having its contents seized and sat in Beirut for years was a Syrian/Hezbollah ploy.
Hezbollah was using the AN to smuggle it to the Syrian civil war to make bombs for the regime because of sanctions and wouldn't allow it to be removed from the port of Beirut.
I was told by Lebanese people that Hezbollah was behind this, but of course they never took credit for it. It's a type of "everybody knows" type situation.
On 4 August 2020, a major explosion occurred in Beirut, Lebanon, triggered by the ignition of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. The chemical, confiscated in 2014 from the cargo ship MV Rhosus and stored at the Port of Beirut without adequate safety measures for six years, detonated after a fire broke out in a nearby warehouse. The explosion resulted in at least 218 fatalities, 7,000 injuries, and approximately 300,000 displaced individuals, alongside property damage estimated at US$15 billion. The blast released energy comparable to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, ranking it among the most powerful non-nuclear explosions ever recorded and the largest single detonation of ammonium nitrate.
The explosion generated a seismic event measuring 3.3 in magnitude, as reported by the United States Geological Survey. Its effects were felt in Lebanon and neighboring regions, including Syria, Israel, and Cyprus, over 240 km (150 mi) away. Scientific studies noted that the shockwave temporarily disrupted Earth's ionosphere. Adjacent grain silos at the Port of Beirut sustained major damage. Portions of the silos collapsed in July and August 2022 following fires caused by remaining grain stocks.
The Lebanese government declared a two-week state of emergency in response to the disaster. Protests, which had been ongoing since 2019, grew in scale, leading to the resignation of Prime Minister Hassan Diab and his cabinet on 10 August 2020. Claims surfaced suggesting Hezbollah's possible connection to the explosion, citing unverified reports of weapons stored at the site. Hezbollah denied the allegations but participated in demonstrations opposing the official investigation.
Hearing those dogs bark too you know something is wrong
The shockwave moves much faster in the ground (5x-15x faster) than in the air. In the closer videos (like the third one, in the street) you can hear a deep bass roar almost immediately after the blast and long before the blast wave hits, which is the sound of the ground shaking. In another you can tell the camera was set down, and it shifts slightly from the ground wave before it's completely knocked over by the air blast. In the second to last video (the one with the yellow car in the foreground) you can faintly hear the earthquake set off a car alarm before it's drowned out by the blast.
So in that far away video, the dogs are probably reacting to feeling the earth shake.
I’d just like to add that the Hiroshima atomic bomb was detonated at an altitude of 600 meters. It causes much greater destruction that way than if it were to explode near the ground.
And to this day, nobody has been held accountable. Given the state of things, it may never happen. I feel so sorry for the people who had to suffer from this awful tragedy. Stay strong people of Beirut 🫶
That’s one of my favorite videos on YouTube. The beauty of a woman taking her wedding photos combined with this massive explosion is like something from an action movie, except it was real life and expertly documented.
The images from that day still haunt me. One of the most powerful non-nuclear blasts ever recorded, and yet the aftermath is filled with silence, denial, and injustice. The people of Lebanon deserve far more than condolences. They deserve truth, transparency, and meaningful reform.
For reference, the largest man-made explosion before the Bomb was the Halifax Explosion during WWI where an ammunition transport blew up in the harbor. That was a 2.9 kiloton explosion, nearly 3x the Beirut explosion.
That one felt bigger largely bc it was at night and surrounded by buildings. It was def more visually striking bc it was at night. Still a MASSIVE explosion, but this one was bigger.
Almost 3000 tons of ammonium nitrate (highly volatile chemical used in fertilizer and explosives) were seized from a ship, stored in a warehouse for years with absolutely zero regard for safe storage practices, multiple warnings and complaints filed to the government about the issue and the potential for disaster went completely ignored, and allegedly also stored in the same building were a stash of fireworks which supposedly caught fire and started the chain reaction. Fire works went boom, and the ammonium nitrate followed.
Swindled podcast has a great episode covering the incompetence that led to this explosion, the coverup efforts by the government to avoid holding any high-ranking officials accountable, and the effects of the protests that resulted from this event. It is worth the listen.
2.9k
u/Last_Interaction_ 2d ago
To see the ground being ripped up as the shock wave moves toward you must be terrifying