Blowing in the Wind

[izmeina]

Some history geek DJ played this on the radio this morning

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I wonder what sort of monstrosity will be named in honour of Mary Trump

It is kind of creepy that this anniversary turns up the day after the explosions in Beirut. That was about 2.5 thousand tons of ammonium nitrate and could be heard in Cyprus some several hundred miles away. The Hiroshima bomb was 13 kiloton which is pipsqueak stuff by today's standards

It is astonishing to think that such flammable material could be left in a warehouse for 6 years or so. Didn't these people ever do chemistry at school. It literally was a ticking time bomb

There have been many bushfires in Australia triggered by people welding on fire ban days because somehow welding doesn't quite count as fire in most folks minds but this is a whole new level of craziness

It was probably already prohibitively expensive to get any sort of insurance in Beirut if even possible at all. So all the people killed or injured or who have their houses destroyed will be left to pick up the pieces.

A lot of people may also suffer severe hearing loss or brain damage from the shock wave. And the force of this explosion is positively pea sized compared to some of the stuff that can be unleashed from the infamous Football.

Comments

[ozfille]

There is about 12000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate (about 4 times the amount involved in Beirut) stored just a few kilometres from the centre of Newcastle and houses are just 800 metres away. If that went up there would be no more Newcastle. The people who live in North Stockland have been wanting the company to move the plant where it is produced and stored, closer to the mines where the stuff is used to blast out coal.

Orica says their stockpile is perfectly safe but they were responsible for a leak of the toxic chemical, hexavalent chromium and three leaks of arsenic into the Hunter River and a State Govt committee has been told that the company had breached its licence 130 times over a decade. Orica also released mercury vapours which exceeded the licensed levels when they had a plant at Botany and caused groundwater pollution via toxic waste storage in a number of sites around Sydney.