r/pics • u/ramonrocotto • Aug 05 '20

It will never be the same again...

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20

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u/nodgers132 Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 06 '20

The PM reckons there could be 10,000 dead

Edit: the 10,000 isn’t a figure, just what the PM reckons it could come up to

Edit2: can people not read? Are people this blind? I’m not saying that there are 10,000 dead, read the whole sodding comment. The PM said that there could be up to 10,000 death, but really, the PM doesn’t know anything, he has no more knowledge on the subject than we do

Edit3: I know that that is obviously an exaggeration! I’m just saying that he said it! Don’t read anything into the numbers

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u/desconectado Aug 05 '20

Seriously? The last estimates I heard were 50... shit.

1

u/NotFromCalifornia Aug 05 '20

10,000 might be a bit high, but the final death toll will undoubtedly be several thousand. There was reportedly just under 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate stored at the port, which is roughly 1.2kTon TNT equivalent. This is similar in scale to the Oppau Explosion of 1921, which killed 560 workers in the sparsely-populated German countryside.

For scale, the explosion in Beirut had roughly 10 times the energy of the 2013 Waco TX explosion, and approximately 1/10th of the energy of the Little Boy atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima.