China's Little Blowup...

[BanzaiCat]

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.

[Centurion40]

Holy shit!

[Gusington]

The video of that is amazing. It really does look like something nuclear.

[mirth]

The 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

[Sir Slash]

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.

[LongBlade]

I thought I heard a report that it was munitions. Haven't heard it since so I don't know if it's true.

[mirth]

The 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.

[LongBlade]

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.

[BanzaiCat]

Natural Gas is nothing to screw with...it can truly create explosions of biblical proportions.

[Nefaro]

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.

[LongBlade]

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.

[Nefaro]

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?

[GDS_Starfury]

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

[Centurion40]

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.

[Gusington]

Yeah the cars were new...either ready to be shipped or.just offloaded.