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Large explosion in Beirut... 23

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You could extinguish some fires with live steam and battening down the hatches!
 
As someone who has filled American gas cans at Canadian marinas and mixed outboard oil in packaging with any of the 3 unit systems since I was old enough to read, I've been aware of the differences between US & Imperial gallons and ounces my entire life. We still buy boat gas to this day at a pump calibrated in Imperial gallons. And at about 18 years of age became aware of those 1.14 liter bottles at the duty free stores.

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The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.
 
yes, KKg = metric ton = 2204.6 lb. The US incidents are given in English tons, so I converted for the same basis. (Mt could be mega-ton and mt milli-ton, so it's tricky to know how to abbreviate).

Interested parties can find lots of information on AN hazards and explosive effects in the US Chemical Safety Board's final report on the West Fertilizer plant accident. (The CSB has put out reams of information generally valuable to industry and society over the years, but is currently being starved of funding and leadership to passively close it down- but I digress into editorial). Also note that this- and the Tianjin accidents were both contemporary with the storage period of this material in Beirut. The Texas City accident was the largest (non-redacted) accident in terms of AN in the CSB survey, giving Beirut the new dubious distinction on that count.

Of course there's myriad factors that affect relative severity of the four disasters. Still, the quite sizable explosion from the Waco incident from a _comparatively_ small amount of material makes me wonder if the explosive force scales non-linearly with the amount of AN?
 
I'm not sure with that massive amount of oxidizer that confinement would be a big issue...

Dik
 
Good grief, hundreds dead and thousands injured, and we're disappearing down the rabbit hole of conversion factors and debating just where this explosion ranks historically.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
 
To be fair ironic, you did state the obvious in your previous post. Given that this isn't an engineering disaster, is it any surprise that engineers would look for something engineering related to argue over?
 
Google Translate works
twitter_jkiejl.png


TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
IRStuff said:
Google Translate works
Click to expand...
Why do I always forget that?
Thanks

Brad Waybright

It's all okay as long as it's okay.
 
It's pretty amazing, isn't it? At no other time in history has so much information been available and so easily converted into one's own native language. A mere 30 yrs ago such information would have taken weeks or months to become available to the general public.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
It is said that if enough monkeys type randomly on typewriters, they will eventually type the works of Shakespeare.
With that though in mind, how many buildings full of human "Calculators" would it take to run the Google Translate algorithms in any useful time?

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter
 
Hah! but, you'd also get an infinite number of close, but not close enough "translations" among a truckload of completely wrong translations. That would almost be worse than having no translation at all ;-)

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
Apologies if the technical conversation comes across as callous. Thoughts and prayers to all those affected, but the Beirut victims were no more- or less worthy (or grieved) than those near Waco or Tianjin. I think adding to the Beirut tragedy is that those TWO previous widely reported similar accidents occurred apparently WHILE THIS BEIRUT MATERIAL WAS IN STORAGE, yet no one responsible seems to have taken notice of the technical lessons to be learned.
 
In this disaster there are no technical lessons to be learned.

"Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts."
 
Sorry, I guess it was Google Chrome itself; when I right click the page, the context menu shows an entry for "Translate to English" but I think it's Google Translate behind that entry

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert! faq731-376 forum1529 Entire Forum list
 
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