Lebanon blast

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Nightjar said:
Rockhunter62 said:
Hey Peter, I think you may have meant cordtex. Cordite is an old straw like propellant used in old small arms ammunition ie: very old .303 cartridges. Cordtex is a plastic coated cord that has PETN as a filling and detonates at around 7000 metres per second.

Doug

That's the one Doug, "cordtex", corrected my post but still spelt it wrong..... :zzz:
50 years have lapsed since I watched them loading blast holes, hope my memory can be excused? :lol:

How do they arrange the timing so the open cut face comes down in slices? Old memory again recalls something about the blast not "rocking"?
ie: Rocks not being sprayed endangering plant/equipment and workers?

They use delays between the rows Pete.

Cheers

Doug
 
Nightjar said:
Rockhunter62 said:
Hey Peter, I think you may have meant cordtex. Cordite is an old straw like propellant used in old small arms ammunition ie: very old .303 cartridges. Cordtex is a plastic coated cord that has PETN as a filling and detonates at around 7000 metres per second.

Doug

That's the one Doug, "cordtex", corrected my post but still spelt it wrong..... :zzz:
50 years have lapsed since I watched them loading blast holes, hope my memory can be excused? :lol:

How do they arrange the timing so the open cut face comes down in slices? Old memory again recalls something about the blast not "rocking"?
ie: Rocks not being sprayed endangering plant/equipment and workers?

Flyrock ?

"Wouldnt happen in Australia"

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nearly forgot this one . Ironic
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and the truck carrying Ammonium Nitrate in West Oz in 2014 has some light scratches to polish out.

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It was on the news, the AN plant is at Newcastle NSW . Within stones throw of the city , there is usually about 12,000 tons there , for use on the coal fields .
 
Personally, my bet is that it was a tragic accident caused by incompetence..

That said, in that part of the world you can't rule out something more sinister...

If I were going with a conspiracy theory, I would speculate that warehouse has been a source of AN for AnFo for ME terrorists since the cargo was unloaded a number of years ago.

If a certain ME country believed this or had reason to belive it was about to happen, I could imagine them taking covert action.

If there is any truth about there being a firework factory near by, I would imagine two incendiary devices would be sufficient to set both locations off and also be very hard to prove. They would also have an added bonus of seriously destabilising what they see as a hostile Government...
 
Pete E said:
Personally, my bet is that it was a tragic accident caused by incompetence..

That said, in that part of the world you can't rule out something more sinister...

If I were going with a conspiracy theory, I would speculate that warehouse has been a source of AN for AnFo for ME terrorists since the cargo was unloaded a number of years ago.

If a certain ME country believed this or had reason to belive it was about to happen, I could imagine them taking covert action.

If there is any truth about there being a firework factory near by, I would imagine two incendiary devices would be sufficient to set both locations off and also be very hard to prove. They would also have an added bonus of seriously destabilising what they see as a hostile Government...

Both options are equally credible :Y:

The latter has been done before.
 
I bet security has been ramped up at all the other AN storage facilities around the world. Whether this was a terrorist action or not, extremists of all ilks would have taken note of just how effective it was.
 
If you look at the aerial photos its apparent that the huge grain silo deflected 30 - 50 % of the blast away from the city buildings behind it , they were lucky , it could have been twice as bad if not for the silo taking the brunt and deflecting a good part of the blast wave upwards instead of across the ground.

The infrastructure to the other side of the silo got it worse but that side had less public buildings.

The downside is the destruction of the grain silo leaves them starving again
 
A part of me really does feel sorry for them, but another part remembers the news coverage from that part of the world showing all the singing and jubilation in the streets after the 911 attacks....
 
Pete E said:
A part of me really does feel sorry for them, but another part remembers the news coverage from that part of the world showing all the singing and jubilation in the streets after the 911 attacks....

I must admit I joked when it happened that it was the first accidental explosion in the history of that country.
 
Goldfreak said:
At high temperatures,ammoniumandnitrogen dioxideare formed when ammonium nitrate breaks down, and can react together to produce massive amounts of heat.
If the heat isnt dissipated and the reaction rate is allowed to escalate, the reaction will eventually cause detonation.

Not my words.

Thanks Goldfreak, I wondered what the reaction was. I had expected a reducing agent to be involved. Interesting.
 
This just reminds me of Feruque from the castle, 'you have friend, I have friend, my friend come round and put bomb in your car and blow you to fkn sky!' :lol:
 
Im gunna have to pull my computer apart and clean the spittle off the inside of the screen :argh: after watching those videos of Adam Savages dad, theorizing about ammonium nitrate. :eek:
 

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