But see, the free market will determine exactly which massive explosive storage units you will want to do business with. And if they don't pass muster, and just happen to kill a bunch of people, well, then we won't have to do business with them anymore, right?
Correct, and If those people in Lebanon didn't want to get exploded they just should have moved. When I see stuff like this I can't help but feel a connection living in Houston constantly dealing with refineries, chemical plants, and factories exploding.
Thinking about the coast is exactly why I brought it up. It's a Libertarian Dream! that only a Commodore could love.
Yeah, but the one in West was like a firecracker compared to this one. This thing's blast wave was something that looked ungodly. The force of that explosion from as far away as some of those videos were taken is insane. If this had happened in West, they would've had to rename it East.
No, I get it. That was horrific, literally like watching something get bombed from the air. You know what I'm talking about when I say Texas City, right?
I went to look if this explosion registered as seismic activity... holy hell, it registered a 3.3 quake for an explosion ABOVE GROUND. Had it been underground, it probably would've registered even higher : https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us6000b9bx/executive
It was long before my time , but I heard about it back during the West explosion. That explosion was similar to this one, probably.
On 16 April 1947, SS Grandcamp, loaded with 8,500 short tons (7,700 t) of ammonium nitrate, exploded in port at Texas City, Texas. 581 died, over 5,000 injured. Using standard chemical data for decomposition of ammonium nitrate makes this equivalent to 2.7 kilotons of TNT exploding. The US Army rates the relative effectiveness factor of ammonium nitrate, compared to TNT, as 0.42.[39] This conversion factor makes the blast equivalent to (0.42)7,770 tons, or 3.2 kilotons of TNT, with the discrepancy between the total energy and relative effectiveness value of the explosive power being due to direct comparisons between high explosives not being as simplistic as comparing total internal energy of each high explosive.
Very interesting information. It also puts in perspective of how powerful a nuclear bomb would be. Given the estimated Texas City explosion TNT equivalent estimation, the Beirut explosion is about 1.1 kiloton of TNT. The largest thermonuclear weapon US ever made was the B53 at 9 megatons, about 8000 times more powerful than the Beirut explosion. The B53 was only about 12 ft long and 50 inches wide, about 2/3 of the size of a Honda Civic. The Tsar bomb was 50 megatons, 44,000 times more powerful than the Beirut explosion.
Makes you wonder how many random warehouses in Houston, a major port and industrial city, have **** like this stacked up.
Horrible and very sad for Beirut. I also heard that a lot of grain was stored next to the warehouse that exploded and in the images you can see the grain elevators. This might lead to famine there if they don't get help soon. Beirut was once like Monaco but decades of civil war along with wars in neighboring countries and getting essentially occupied by Syria and then invaded by Israel it's never come close to what was it's former glory. This will just set them back even further.
I hate bureaucracy because it tends to feed itself to a breaking point but there is a place for government regulation. And it failed here. Nah. Corner store, school, chicken finger joint, strip club, gas station, neighborhood, titty bar, factory, warehouse, mini mart, strip club, church, school, quick stop. I wouldn't have it any other way.
Didn't you hear that zoning is communism. I'll let the free market tell me where I can and can't put a strip club. Or God.
The large Pepcon explosion was 1 kiloton and registered a magnitude 3.3 on the Richter scale -- so this seems a pretty good comparison of the event in Lebanon.
