Fertilizer plant explodes near Waco, Texas - Must see!

Fertilizer plant explodes near Waco, Texas, causing numerous injuries

WEST, Texas — A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety says an unknown number of people were killed in a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant near Waco. D.L. Wilson says it will be some time before authorities know the full extent of the loss of life and damage caused by Wednesday night’s blast at the plant in West, about 20 miles north of Waco.


The explosion at West Fertilizer happened shortly before 8 p.m. and damaged buildings for blocks in every direction.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...34de68-a7cd-11e2-9e1c-bb0fb0c2edd9_story.html



This video is insane!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA&feature=youtu.be
[video=youtube;ROrpKx3aIjA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROrpKx3aIjA&feature=youtu.be[/video]

 

Maybe blown eardrums. I wouldn't think any deafness would be permanent.

 

Projecting 60-70 deaths, and I think there may be more once the area is contained enough to thoroughly explore. What a shitty week and what a scary explosion. Reports are that it registered as a 2.1 earthquake and could be felt 100 miles away in Dallas. That is just insane.

 

The dates during this week have so much tragic history... the Waco siege, the OKC bombing, columbine, Boston marathon bombing, now this. I know I'm missing an event or two...just eery how many tragic events have happened around this time.

 

VA Tech.

 

I haven't seen much of this (I'll look it up in the most recent news), but a Fuel-Air explosive bomb (similar to MOAB or Russian ATBIP) is generally either detonated from altitude or in conjuction with a bunker-buster. While it's not usually surface-detonated, if it is employed that way you get the same type of "mushroom cloud" you would from what most think of in a nuclear detonation. That's from the intense heat generated by the blast rising up, taking particulate with it, and then dissipating outward as it cools. The blast radius from a nuclear device (of a size that would probably be employed ballistically) is much higher, while a "tactical" nuclear device would be on the same order of magnitude as a normal MOAB or ATBIP.

Tactical nuclear weapons (which are being phased out in favor of non-nuclear FAEs/MOABs/dial-a-yield B61 nuclear bombs) are generally in the tens-of-kilotons range of yield, which is similar to the MOABs and FAEs. You obviously don't get "nuclear" fallout from MOABs/FAEs, but that doesn't mean that the secondary blast effects aren't dangerous for the initial survivors. You won't get EMP from a non-nuclear device (though you can have EMP bombs on a much smaller scale--chemical munitions can't recreate the energy of a nuclear blast for anything close to the same weapons weight), but you still have a blast wave, secondary superheating, and the "non-nuclear fallout" that can still be harmful long-term.

Based on the initial reporting, some are saying that it looks like a "yield" of about 1-3 kilotons (Hiroshima, for instance, was ~15 kT and Nagasaki 22kT). I don't know about that. I've read that there was a 2.1 earthquake that registered (100x smaller than the "Beast Mode" Seattle earthquake and barely recognizable). If there was a ground-detonated bomb that went off that was 1-3kT, I'd expect a higher reading, but I'm not a geologist. (North Korea's nuclear tests registered 4.3 for a 1kT test, 4.7 for a 4-7kT test and 5.1 for a 10kT test--open source). For those saying that it could've been a tactical nuke, there wouldn't be electrical power anywhere near Waco if that was the case. If it was a "dirty bomb", you wouldn't have had a fission yield but you'd have significant evidence of irradiated fallout. So that's not the case, afaik. If it was a MOAB, it would be roughly an order of magnitude higher yield than what's being reported/guessed about, with a concomitant blast radius increase (which is generally proportional to the square root of the size increase). So if you believe that this was a 1kT yield and blew up houses a few hundred feet away, a MOAB would have blown up houses maybe 1000 feet away and incinerated the apartment complex they're showing pictures of.

I'm not sure if I answered your question...?

 

They were saying on the news overnight that the blast leveled 5-10 square blocks. Hundreds of homes and apartment buildings. All looking like that picture.

 

while that's horrible, this is what 15kT does...to much more than a 2-3 block radius