OT: Tianjin explosion

The news says the second explosion was "20 tons TNT equivalent" which judging by the video seems like at least an order of magnitude underestimate...

It sure looks like there were some windows blowing out in some of those shots.

Explosives are dangerous! There was once a dynamite factory a few blocks from our house. Once.

China is a weird mixture of extreme political repression and uncontrolled commercial excess.

Hmmm. That does seem low, but it might actually be in the ballpark. The destruction of a large explosion doesn't necessarily scale up linearly with the TNT-equivalent number... the square-cube law kicks in.

The Texas City explosion in '47 (worst industrial accident in the U.S. according to some) had an effective yield of somewhere around

3,000 tons TNT equivalent. The Halifax explosion of 1917 was of a similar size. Death tolls in those disaster ranged from high hundreds up to a couple of thousand.

The Little Boy bomb at Hiroshima was in the 12-to-15-kiloton range.

The media is reporting 50 confirmed dead, and hundreds hospitalized in the Tianjin explosion... a fraction of the Texas City and Halifax numbers.

So, maybe it is "tens of tons" rather than "hundreds or thousands of tons"?

It's also certainly possible that the Chinese government is understating the magnitude of the explosion. Maybe there was more hazardous material stored in that port location than they'd let on, or more than the safety rules said was supposed to be there? Wouldn't be the first time in the world that local officials had "bent the rules" in order to meet quota or make a profit.

As with all such, it's a terrible tragedy... I have no doubt that a lot of families will have been torn apart as the results of what has happened.

CNN reports two of the blasts were equivalent to Richter 2.3 and 2.9 earthquakes!

"Dangerous goods" indeed.

Mark L. Fergerson

There were - a lot:

See the video down the bottom half of the page - the reporter is in the vicinity of the explosion.

Being married to someone from China, it's not half as bad as anyone likes to think. The Internet is filtered to hell which is annoying but not hard to get around.

As for "repression" - not much worse that many other western countries IMO. You can't go and stand up and say "President Thingy is a wanker" - at least not on public media. But no one gives a damn what you talk about on the street. OTOH if you are French and draw a picture of some historic figure... (Yes I know that's not the State - but freedom is absolute).

Things in China move slow and I think they are moving for the better. But slowly. Very very slowly. I think what they are afraid off is something like Glasnost. Rapid throwing out of the old system to be replaced by - well nothing effective. Look at the problems Russia has - gangsters, wide boys and oligarchs moving in to every unaccounted bit of power vacuum. They'd rather get there in tiny increments.

Anyway - back to the explosion. I thought initially, it might be a fireworks stash - but it sounds like that may not have been the case. Someone's going to be in deep doo-doo when they get to the bottom of this. The head of a logistics company connected with the site has already been held for questioning.

In the clip starting at 11 seconds, it looked like the whole building or fence or whatever in front of him was smashed to kindling.

I been past the site of the AZF factory in Toulouse a number times

by the looks of it, and the damages to the buildings around, it was gigantic and the say it was 20-40 ton TNT equivalent

-Lasse

It spalled the concrete on those close high rises which were at 1000 ft.

Sounds like these Dutch morons:

Death toll will be 500 hundred before it's over, lots and lots of severe burn victims, even the U.S. would be challenged to handle that number, and that after flying them to burn units all over the country. I'm pretty sure PRC isn't going to bother.

This was chemical explosion, it was not HE explosion.

This is horrible:

Nearby apartment buildings look shredded. And cyanide?

Church groups, yoga groups, all sorts of non-government group activities are criminal in China. They don't treat ethnic minorities very well, either.

As far as the explosion goes, they will probably execute a couple of company managers, then back to business as usual.

This was pretty bad, too:

John Larkin schreef op 08/13/2015 om 07:38 PM:

It surprised me as well that the blast wave had so much power even when the people recording is where a couple of kilometers/miles away.

My experiments with simple fireworks for kids prooved that early on in my life.

In the NL a fireworks depot exploded which destroyed an entire neighbourhood. Some people filming from their doorstep where blown inside by the blast wave. That fire went on for a while before the explosion so most people got away (12 or 15 dead).

On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 10:38:20 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

Only if one bribes the inspectors and those granting licenses to 'operate'.

On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 19:13:18 +0100, Tim Watts Gave us:

Fireworks do not detonate all at once like that and when they do go off, they go off in all direction with a lot more fanfare, as it were.

That was an explosives stash IMO. The detonation rate was too fast for much else.

Some of the chemicals there go into contact ignition with water. The fire department was at the scene prior to the explosion. The fire department usually sprays water on the fire and surrounding area. Do we have a match?

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

On Thu, 13 Aug 2015 20:16:10 -0700, John Larkin Gave us:

"South Korean drama"? (was supposedly all they aired)

North Korean drama would have been the rumored execution of the Vice Premier the other day.

I wonder if they used artillery this time.

The number of reported deaths, 44 or 50, is absurd.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
lunatic fringe electronics 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

Not to mention that CNN was hospitalized (according to their own headline)...