China's port of Tianjin apparently suffered some 'splosions:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-33896292
Reports now say the death toll is around 50 with hundreds injured...I imagine it will get much higher than that. Either that or their government has the screws down tight on things.
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Holy shit!
The video of that is amazing. It really does look like something nuclear.
QuoteThe first explosion happened around 11:30 p.m. and registered as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake, according to the China Earthquake Administration.
The second blast, 30 seconds later, was even more powerful. It was measured at magnitude 2.9, roughly the equivalent of 21 tons of TNT.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/08/13/world/asia/tianjin-china-explosions-maps.html
I saw that on Fox this am. Similar to an event in N. Korea some years back where railroad cars from China blew-up. Talk at the time was Heavy Water connected to Nuke research.
I thought I heard a report that it was munitions. Haven't heard it since so I don't know if it's true.
QuoteThe precise nature of the materials that exploded was not clear on Thursday. The explosions took place at a warehouse owned by Ruihai International Logistics, a private company licensed to handle potentially hazardous cargo. According to the Tianjin Tanggu Environmental Monitoring Station, the company stored a collection of toxic industrial chemicals, including sodium cyanide, toluene diisocyanate and calcium carbide, and was licensed to handle highly combustible substances such as compressed and liquefied natural gas.
Quite the devil's cocktail.
Ah. Not exactly any better. All those cooked cars tell quite the tale. 50 dead? No way. There are well over 50 cars in the parking lot and I'll be most of the workers rode bikes.
Natural Gas is nothing to screw with...it can truly create explosions of biblical proportions.
The explosion and shockwave in that vid reminds me of a massive boiler that exploded almost a mile away from where I was working, long ago in my youth. It reportedly blew the top four or five floors off a big Bayer factory (IIRC) and levelled stuff around it for a ways. It was the middle of the night, so nobody was working close enough to the boiler to die in the blast fortunately.
I just recall the shockwave hitting our building, the light fixtures flashing off and falling off the ceiling.. stuff getting knocked over. We were around six or seven blocks away but the force of it was still strong enough to make you stumble at that distance.
I wouldn't be surprised to hear this Chinese incident involved some large containers filled with dangerous pressurized chems. The vid only showed two big explosions didn't it? I'd expect munitions to be popping off a lot of secondaries instead of a few large BOOMs.
Reports are the Chinese are playing South Korean operas on TV instead of covering the blast. They're shutting down bloggers attempting to report the news. Whatever happened, they don't want anyone to know anything about it.
Quote from: LongBlade on August 13, 2015, 01:13:22 PM
Reports are the Chinese are playing South Korean operas on TV instead of covering the blast. They're shutting down bloggers attempting to report the news. Whatever happened, they don't want anyone to know anything about it.
That's actually quite normal for the Chinese, isn't it?
still minor compared to the Soviet Navy munitions dump that blew up in the 80's.
http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/23/world/us-says-blast-hit-soviet-arms-base.html
Quote from: LongBlade on August 13, 2015, 01:02:49 PM
Ah. Not exactly any better. All those cooked cars tell quite the tale. 50 dead? No way. There are well over 50 cars in the parking lot and I'll be most of the workers rode bikes.
The cars look like they are in an auto-port storage lot, not a parking lot. They probably haven't been sold to anyone yet.
Yeah the cars were new...either ready to be shipped or.just offloaded.
Hopefully that bodes well for the number involved in the blast.
Drone footage. Looks like some kind of news outlet.
with the way the Chinese are locking down all non official discussions on this, I wonder if the death toll is a lot higher than they will ever claim.
Was watching the footage last night, unbelievable... I can only imagine how worse this would have been had it happened during the daytime with a lot more people around.
Some of that video footage is crazy close range. 20 tons of TNT isn't a little blowup when you're that close. There's a security cam video of somebody in a building checking the front doors right when the blast hits him - crazy.
It's a small world, our neighbors (and friends) are from Tianjin. Worlds 10th busiest port. I'm wondering if the backlash from this will pressure the authorities to enforce proper safety procedures at several other of the major port cities there. The
I've seen vids of gas explosions in the past, usually at some plant outside of the city. I remember a year back seeing a vid about a gas explosion in Taiwan right in the middle of the city - straight out of a disaster movie :o
I suspect that some of the media clampdown is because the ruling leadership apparatus thinks ordinary folk will be afraid to go outside to work and shop due to fear of all the toxic materials that have been introduced into the already suspect air over much of the urban Chinese mainland were those folks to learn of what actually happened.
I used this vid I found on YouTube in a couple of Natural Gas training courses I put together:
They certainly pounded that 'Fear of the BLEVE' into us back in my EMS days. Even gas grills that had been sitting in the sun made me nervous for a while.
This one happened in taiwan.
Odd thing is, after the explosion the air over the city is probably cleaner now than before. It's China after all.
So some of the shit stored in that warehouse (calcium carbide for example) reacts with water in nasty ways. Fighting the fire may have contributed to the explosions.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/08/14/uk-china-blast-idUKKCN0QJ01H20150814 (http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/08/14/uk-china-blast-idUKKCN0QJ01H20150814)
QuoteLei Jinde, the deputy propaganda department head of China's fire department, a part of the Ministry of Public Security, told state-backed news website ThePaper.cn that the first group of fire fighters on the scene had used water. "We knew there was calcium carbide inside but we didn't know whether it had already exploded," he said.
Well fuck it then. Just start hosing it down with water.
This vid was obviously taken by someone closer to the explosion than the original. Complete with breaking window glass. Good thing he ducked for cover.
His expletives describe the situation well, IMO. :o
This one is pretty damn close:
There must've been some very large containers with volatile pressurized stuff sitting out there. :o I suppose a large fire had broken out, and the firefighters couldn't put it out before those went up (judging by the many firefighter deaths).
An image of the crater at the blast center in Tianjin.
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Now see how close it was to residential and commercial highrises...
(https://i.imgur.com/gYCmfAd.jpg)
Wow :o
I havent seen a hole that big since the last time Mirth bent over. :o
Gonne need a whole shit-load of new screen doors over in China. :coolsmiley:
Shouldn't be a problem...everything they need they make anyway :/
Quote from: LongBlade on August 13, 2015, 01:13:22 PM
Reports are the Chinese are playing South Korean operas on TV instead of covering the blast. They're shutting down bloggers attempting to report the news. Whatever happened, they don't want anyone to know anything about it.
They're a bit late for that! Too many people know about it, and there is outrage in Tianjian that the government have done nothing to help those who have had their homes destroyed. Plus big questions are being asked about the chemical storage facility that had not been publicly disclosed to residents.
Another one.
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/explosion-at-chemical-plant-in-east-china-casualties-unknown-xinhua#xtor=CS1-10