Beirut bang

[sunnybob]

Have you seen the news about the enormous explosions in Beirut?

We heard all three of them while sitting in the garden.
We thought it was a local quarry which often uses explosives, until the news flashes started coming in.
Looked up the straight line distance between us and Beirut, Its a 160 MILES away!!!! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:

 

[Trevanion]

It's amazing how far sound travels over the sea, I think I remember someone telling me you can be heard shouting up to 12 miles away on the sea on a clear day.

Shame about the blast, deaths and injuries though, must've been one hell of a warehouse full of explosives.

 

[Blackswanwood]

The artillery on the Somme was supposed to have been heard in London.

That does look terrible in Beirut.

 

[Droogs]

yeah but at the Somme, we fired the equivalent of 5m tons of TNT. 70 000 rounds of ammunition and hour for 7 days

 

[doctor Bob]

Looks very very bad.

 

[billw]

Seen quite a few videos of it now - must have been a hell of a lot of munitions/fireworks/whatever that went bang (source depends on the reports).

 

[doctor Bob]

2500 tonnes of sodium nitrate.
Basically an illegal store making a gigantic fertilizer bomb.
I think the IRA manchester bomb was 20 tonnes.
the devastation is horrendous.

 

[novocaine]

ammonium nitrate and it was in a port facility, which means quite possibly bonded warehouse which means no one had any idea what it was or knew what it was but didn't think. it's been sat there 6 years, which suggests they couldn't do anything about it because it hadn't had it's duty paid as the ship it came from had been impounded (and most likely sold on again 6 months later), the "normal" reason for impounding is the shipping company has gone bust (one a day). no shipping company, no one to pay the import duty. ports of full of abandoned stuff, if it's worth something and can be sold easily it is, 2750tons of slightly smelly powder isn't going to be sold on quickly.

think plants not bombs.

note, all hyperbole until the investigation releases it's findings.

 

[sunnybob]

An almost copy cat of Cyprus, 9 years ago to the month;
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-14102253

 

[novocaine]

except cyprus was bombs. this was fertilizer. Apparently the port authority has been trying to get rid of it for the past 6 years as they knew it was dangerous but the judicial system made it difficult.

 

[sunnybob]

I said "almost"
The dangerous materials, the inability to deal with a known problem, the reason they were there in the first place, all the same.
Except more people were killed fighting the Cyprus incident, but only a handful of casualties.

 

[novocaine]

fair comment.

 

[sunnybob]

My info was out of date. The Beirut death toll is already well over a 100 and certain to rise. That far exceeds the Cyrpus deaths.
Condolences and sympathies to all who have suffered.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

From today's 12pm Times -

The ammonium nitrate which caused the devastating explosions in Beirut was abandoned in the port on a Russian-owned ship that became unseaworthy.

The 2,750 tonnes of fertiliser ingredient were moved to a warehouse in 2014 after arriving on a Moldova-flagged cargo ship called the Rhosus the previous year.

The 87-metre ship was reportedly owned by Igor Grechushkin, a businessman from the Russian city of Khabarovsk whose now-defunct Teto Shipping Ltd was registered on the Marshall Islands, in the Pacific Ocean.

Mr Grechushkin is said to be based in Cyprus, a Mediterranean haven for Russian businesses seeking low taxes and light regulation.

The ship was carrying its cargo from the port of Batumi in Georgia to Mozambique, when it was forced to make an unscheduled stop in Beirut because of unspecified technical problems in late 2013.

The shipping authorities forbade the vessel from sailing further and it was abandoned with four crew stuck on board because of immigration restrictions preventing them going ashore. The men were one Russian and three Ukrainians.

Diplomatic efforts to secure their release were unsuccessful as the sailors’ food and other supplies dwindled. A maritime website headlined an article about the case in July 2014, “Crew Kept Hostages on a Floating Bomb”.