Port of Houston, TX is a ticking time bomb. Got enough chemicals there to start WW3 and they aren't stored too safely.  Just wait till category 5 hurricane hits Houston and see them wondering what went wrong.

"The 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that exploded are believed to have come from a Russian-owned vessel that stopped in Beirut while it was sailing in 2013 from Georgia to Mozambique. The ship was abandoned, and the cargo is believed to have been offloaded to the port’s warehouses, the site of the explosion on Tuesday."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/what-caused-the-beirut-explosion-what-we-know/ar-BB17AfC1?li=BBnb7Kz

There - so Russia is at least partly to blame.

That devastation...

reminds me more of German cities in 1945 than anything else

By the latest numbers, at least 135 persons got killed and over 4000 got injured.

Only if Russia owned/was responsible for that cargo till this day.

If not, they have nothing to be blamed about. It's a 7 year old cargo, after all.

This is why you don't store 2.700.000 kg of highly explosive material at the edge of your city. You would think this to be pretty obvious even without a massive explosion. Very devastating for the civillians, but the gouvernement sure has a lot to answer for.

The way the water just filled in the crater from the explosion. Estimates of the size of the explosion seem to vary, but in general they put it as equivalent to a small nuke, with 0.2 kilotons at the low end and as much as 3 kilotons at the highest end. I'm inclined to think it was around 1 kiloton, but even the smallest estimates are still a ridiculously large explosion. Just horrible. So many things had to have gone wrong for this to have happened, so many mistakes had to have been made. Lebanon hasn't gotten a break in the last half-century.

As someone who works for a government entity and responds to shit like this... A few months ago we had a truck carrying dangerous chemicals of various types across the entire continent, consequently there was an accident that resulted in the closest Hazmat technician brigade (Aka, mine) responding.

The truck driver was contracted by a private company and the private company failed to notify the appropriate authorities who would then have filtered that information to us via the Duty Officer, the vehicle also lacked the appropriate signage to alert us of the substances on board when we arrived to the scene.

So no... It's not always the Government at fault, companies do shady shit all the time without anyone knowing.

Eh. Yes and no.

I would worry more about the transitional chemicals ammonium and nitrogen... Unless you had substantial amounts of aluminium powder or say... Oil hanging around.

Ammonium Nitrate is an accellerant as well, so the issue there is that we cannot "smother" Ammonium Nitrate with CO2 to put out any nearby fires and if there is an explosion, it will make the effect much more substantial.

Generally Ammonium Nitrate isn't flammable or even explosive, it's dangers come into play when it's degrading due to thermal/chemical processes or in confined/restricted spaces.

It is often a substance used in bomb making. Either way, Trump needs to stop being a moron and wait for all the information before passing judgement.

its now 135 dead, and over 5000 wounded.

Wish I could go over there to lend a hand... Having USAR and Hazmat technician training would lend itself well over there...

Poor Lebanon... so much suffering since the 70's on what was once called "Paris of the Middle East"