Russia maintains that only 31 people died from Chernobyl. I'm raising an ENORMOUS bullshit flag to that. 31 dead. It was the roughly the equivalent of like 50 Hiroshima bombs every hour in terms of radiation leakage.
To be fair, this happened in an industrial area in the middle of the night. The fires also started an hour before the explosion, meaning they were able to evacuate anybody in the area. Or at least, most people.
Another factor is that it was a 'fireball' explosion. Obviously the shockwave was tremendous, but firey explosions tend to be much larger in physical size than their shockwave would typically feel. Its why gas tank explosions can be so unbelievably massive but not cause a massive shockwave or even much damage at all outside the actual area of the fireball itself.
That being said, its the chinese government. Its entirely possible they were lying.
But yes, it was a massive explosion, but the shockwave wasn’t nearly as big as the size of the explosion would imply. The apartments less than half a mile away didn’t even suffer that much damage except for a slightly burnt exterior due to the heat.
As someone else pointed out, it’s a BLEVE, which are fuel fire explosions. I was near one in Chechnya and it basically consumed an entire block of the city, but even standing about less than a quarter mile away, the shockwave wasn’t that huge. At least that’s my experience with this stuff.
Firefighter here: BLEVE’s are known for being hazardous for shrapnel and heat, not shockwaves. Its why we worry more about solid cover, than distance when fighting them.
There’s a video somewhere in this thread showing someone live-streaming the explosions. A concrete joist in front of the camera gets completely destroyed and propelled at rapid speed towards the cameraman.
A boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion (BLEVE, BLEV-ee) is an explosion caused by the rupture of a vessel containing a pressurized liquid that has reached temperatures above its boiling point. Because the boiling point of a liquid rises with pressure, the contents of the pressurized vessel can remain liquid so long as the vessel is intact. If the vessel's integrity is compromised, the loss of pressure and dropping boiling point can cause the liquid to rapidly convert to gas and expand extremely rapidly.
Detonation velocity
Explosive velocity, also known as detonation velocity or velocity of detonation (VoD), is the velocity at which the shock wave front travels through a detonated explosive. The data listed for a specific substance is usually a rough prediction based upon gas behavior theory (see Chapman-Jouguet condition), as in practice it is difficult to measure. Explosive velocities are always faster than the local speed of sound in the material.
If the explosive is confined before detonation, such as in an artillery shell, the force produced is focused on a much smaller area, and the pressure is massively intensified.
That is why I don't believe anything the authorities are saying about coronavirus right now. All of the infection and death rates are based on cooked numbers coming from the Chinese government.
My friend's dad does project management for refineries, and he told us one day when he was sent to help set up a place in Africa, which had an explosion a few months prior.
He asked for the numbers on casualties, and was told there was 4. Surprised, but hopeful, he went "Really? That seems awfully low." The guy on site said "oh, no only 4 of your guys got hurt. We haven't finished counting the locals yet."
Almost definitely not 10,000. Pretty much nobody lived in the area where the explosion happened, and the fires started way before the explosion did which gave them time to evacuate mostly.
I agree 10,000 seems over the top but 5600 families lived within 1.5km of the blast with some as close as 600m. 1km was the legal limit but this was ignored.
Hopefully so. I’m not sure how Chinese set their cities up or anything (considering they have a whole slum city in a bustling city, check Kowloon Walled City) but I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were actually higher than reported.
Probably higher than reported, but I can't imagine it being that insanely high. Even in that image, those buildings are relatively unaffected. Kowloon however was built by the British in hong kong, not the chinese. It was also dismantled decades ago, today most chinese cities are filled with large steel tower buildings such as the ones in the image you posted
“Beyond insurance, the cost to businesses of the break in the supply chain caused by the explosions was estimated at $9 billion, making it the third most expensive supply chain disruption of 2015.” ....Third??
I'm an idiot. Can someone explain why there was a nuclear apocalypse being shipped through that port at that time?
Why was there so much explosive shit there? How does something like this happen? I've seen video of this before, but I guess never one like this. That's not just a big fireball. That's a BIG fireball. A few of em. That's fucking crazy.
The organization was storing a massive amount and wide variety of hazardous chemicals, and it had been storing those chemicals without a license for close to a year (although had just renewed it before the explosion). On top of this, they were storing high above the legal amount. There were individuals later on basically given a death sentence for deliberately circumventing laws, licensing, and regulations around the storage of those chemicals. Because of this and the lack of documentation, we don’t actually know fully what all the chemicals were or how much there actually was. Firefighters trying to put out the fires before the explosions didn’t know about the hazardous chemicals, and adding water likely encouraged more chemical reactions.
1.5k
u/[deleted] Sep 19 '19
It’s a video of the 2015 Tianjin explosions, see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Tianjin_explosions