What Really Happened at the Port of Beirut?

By Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar August 7, 2020

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,681, August 7, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: On August 4, 2020, a massive explosion occurred at a warehouse on the waterfront of the Port of Beirut, Lebanon. It killed at least 135 people, wounded at least 5,000, left approximately 300,000 people homeless, and devastated the port region of the city, causing damages estimated between $10 billion and $15 billion. The Lebanese authorities are blaming the explosion on mismanagement by port officials, but there is reason to suspect that it was the result of Hezbollah negligence.

The official report of the Lebanese authorities on the massive August 4 explosion at the Port of Beirut is that a warehouse near the water containing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded. They claim that this material had been in the warehouse for over six years, with the approval of the court, and confirmed this claim with documentation.

With all due respect to the Lebanese authorities, I do not buy this story. I believe that explosives, ammunition, and missile fuel (which are highly volatile and flammable substances) were stored by Hezbollah in this warehouse after being shipped from Iran. There are several reasons why I believe this.

  1. There was a series of at least three explosions, each of which had a different result. The first created a gray column of smoke that remained for several minutes. The second, a column of red smoke, also remained for several minutes, while the third created a white mushroom cloud that dissipated within seconds. This suggests that at least three different materials were stored in that warehouse (see video).
  2. Anyone familiar with how a port operates knows that the front row of warehouses, which are closest to the water, are used for short-term storage. Cargo that is meant to be stored long-term is moved to warehouses further away from the water.
  3. Anyone who ships sensitive cargo and does not want it to be seen, photographed, or targeted by others from air, space, or ground tries to hide it as close as possible to the water. The warehouse that exploded was on the water’s edge.
  4. After Israel (according to foreign sources) attacked the warehouses at Damascus Airport several times, Beirut Seaport replaced Damascus Airport as the destination for Hezbollah’s ammunition and explosives imports from Iran. What used to arrive at Damascus Airport by air is now brought to Beirut by ship. For Hezbollah’s purposes, the warehouses at the port of Beirut have replaced the warehouses of Damascus Airport.
  5. What probably happened on August 4 was an explosion of volatile and flammable materials that were incorrectly stored by Hezbollah for at least a day in a metal, non-airconditioned warehouse. As it is midsummer, temperatures are very high. I believe missile-fuel fumes evaporated from a container and touched the hot wall or ceiling, where they ignited and caused a chain reaction of explosions.
  6. Less than an hour after the explosions, Hezbollah announced that the exploded material was ammonium nitrate. Hezbollah was the first to report it. The reason: Hezbollah was looking for a way to cover up its own negligence and establish an official version that deflected attention away from itself, because no one in the government would dare contradict them.

I suspect that very few people in Lebanon buy Hezbollah’s version of the story. I think Hassan Nasrallah is viewed by the Iranians and, indeed, by his own friends in Hezbollah as personally responsible for this disaster. I would not be surprised to hear that he has suffered a “heart attack” and is thus ending his role as Hezbollah’s secretary general. Perhaps the “heart attack” will be fatal.

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Note: This is an edited version of a post from the Facebook page of Mordechai Kedar.

Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar is a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He served for 25 years in IDF military intelligence specializing in Syria, Arab political discourse, Arab mass media, Islamic groups, and Israeli Arabs, and is an expert on the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

August 7, 2020 | 10 Comments »

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  2. @ Michael S:
    Correction: N is in a +5 state in NO3-., the highest possible state for nitrogen.

    Reader: No conspiracy has been identified, beyond endemic corruption and incompetence. The death and destruction have caused the populace to rise up in anger, regardless of the cause of the blast.

  4. I don’t know why people make it into some complicated conspiracy theory.
    The stuff (fertilizer) was brought in from a ship owned by a Russian citizen who declared bankruptcy and abandoned the ship.
    The stuff was originally going to Mozambique.
    The port officials tried to get the courts’ permission to move the stuff or to get rid of it in some way several times but couldn’t.
    Finally it blew up because of the nearby fire or a negligent repair which caused a fire (some say).
    What does it have to do with anyone’s beliefs or suspicions?
    You have other ideas – prove them!

  5. @ Adam Dalgliesh:
    I assumed you were just quoting it, Adam. I just wanted to set the record straight.

    I don’t know where Ra’anan Elozory got his information; but his “white cloud” mistake is understandable. Nitrogen has many oxidation states. As “NO3-“. or “nitrate”, it is highly oxidizing — meaning that it will give off heat while going from its high state of +7 to states where nitrogen is in a lower state, such as NO (+2), N2O (+1) or N2 (as in ordinary air, +0). All of these products are colorless.

    A simplified equation for the decomposition of ammonium nitrate is:

    NH4NO3 = N2 + 2 H2O (water) +1/2 O2

    The water is given off as steam, giving a white color.

    Nitrogen dioxide, NO2 is formed by a combination of NO, N2O or N2 with atmospheric oxygen. It is a minor product, but it has an intense color. At low temperatures, the resultant gas is yellow-orange; but at temperatures as hot as the Beirut explosion, it is a reddish-brown. It only takes a little NO2 to produce a brilliant color.

    I am interested in the “pops” seen throughout the fire and subsequent explosion. One observer noted that they seemed more like rounds of ammunition going off, than like fireworks.

  6. @ Michael S: Michael, I am just correcting a typo in my last post. I meant to write “This is not what I said. I was just quoting the Arutz Sheva reporter’s views.

  7. @ Michael S: Michael, this is what what I said. I was just quoting the Arutz Sheva reporter’s view. I know nothing about chemistry and have no personal opinion about what chemicals caused the blast. However, I do think that Hezbollah controls the Beirut docks, and consequently bears moral responsibility, and perhaps legal responsibility for the blast, whatever chemicals were involved, and whoever sent them to Beirut. I also suspect, although I do not know, that the chemicals were intentionally delivered to Hamas, whether by this Russian businessman or someone else, and that Hezbollah intended to use them for terrorist attacks of some kind.

  8. Wired had an article on this that is very interesting:

    And nitrate, when mixed to blow, wants to ditch those little O’s. It’s chemically unstable, meaning the bonds between the N and the O’s vibrate with an unhappy level of physical tension. Overloaded with three oxygens, NO3- is eager to shove some onto any neighbor, and with a little bit of heat to get things moving, it will do so willingly. NH4+ is all too happy to accept.

    The chemical rearrangement of ammonium nitrate answers a lot of the public questions about the videos, including the source of the startling red color of the plume. One of the byproducts of NO3- as it sheds all that oxygen is nitrogen dioxide, which has a logically obvious chemical structure of NO2, and looks deep, blood red. Many explosive materials give off tints and hues during a blast that suggest their chemical composition—chemical additives to color both smoke and explosions have been around since before the 1920s and are how we get different-colored fireworks and signaling flares—and it’s nitrogen dioxide that gives an ammonium nitrate explosion its signature, ominous blood-like tone. A small blast can look subtle and orange-ish, but on a large scale like at Beirut, the sunlight helps deepen its hue.

    According to Brad Wojtylak, a special agent bomb technician and certified explosive specialist with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, when smoke plumes are large enough they begin to catch the sunlight, and refraction will darken the normal colors produced by any explosion. Wojtylak is not directly involved in the Beirut investigation but has 16 years of experience investigating blast accidents. He says as sunlight bounces around within the cloud of contaminants, other, less determined wavelengths get refracted off in different directions. When a smoke plume happens on such a large scale only the longest wavelengths, the red shades, persevere all the way through to the viewer on the other side. So, the natural reddish color becomes even deeper, richer, darker than it would be for a small blast.

    An explosive with a pure burn, like any explosive used in military-grade weaponry, will produce smoke that looks equally pure: snowy, billowy white, or sometimes a pale grey. But accidental explosions are far less tidy, and their sloppy combustion also produces ash, particulates, and gross black charred contaminated matter. This black gunk billows into the sky along with the other byproducts, coloring the smoke plume, like the charcoal residue left behind after the more efficient parts of the campfire wood have burned away. To a blast expert, the videos, with their roiling cloud of black and red curling over the pier of Beirut, scream “ammonium nitrate.”
    Not a Shock Wave

    The videos also show an unnervingly uniform hemisphere of white propagating outward from the blast site, a dome of vicious vapor that eventually hurtles toward every person filming and announces its arrival in the audio with a crash. This hemisphere is the pressure wave produced by the explosion.

    No, it’s not a shock wave. It’s a pressure wave, and that key difference affects the number of casualties expected. A shock wave goes from zero pressure to its absolute maximum pressure in literally zero seconds. The impact of a pressure wave is like hitting the ground after rolling down a steep cliff; the force of a shock wave is like hitting the ground after falling through the air and reaching terminal velocity. High explosives produce shock waves; low explosives, like ammonium nitrate, produce pressure waves, which have a bit of slope to their shape, a period of time over which the pressure increases more gradually.

    Above is part of the article

    https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-beirut/

  10. “See today’s Arutz Sheva with an author who has a diagnosis similar to Dr. Kedar:

    “What exploded in the Beirut port?
    Was it nuclear? Was it fertilizer? Was it an arms depot? A scientific look at the evidence after close examination of the films. Opinon.

    Ra’anan Elozory
    Moment of explosion
    This last Tuesday, 04.08.2020, there was a huge explosion in the Beirut dockyards.

    The first accusations by media were that Israel had used a tactical nuke.

    Later, they claimed Israel had fired a Gabriel missile from an offshore ship.

    Then they claimed an F-16 fired a Delilah rocket.

    The problem was that none of these weapons had anywhere near the power that was released.

    Israel immediately stated that they were not involved. If Israel had been involved, they would have announced some details or said nothing at all.

    So what do we know about what it was and what it wasn’t?

    We do know that the warehouse was in a Hezbollah-controlled area.

    A careful look at clips of the explosion shows it was not nuclear, the effects that one can see are what happens once a conventional explosives blast involves about 2 kilotons of TNT in power, or more.

    This effect is known as the Mach Stem Effect. It was first identified after studies of the 1917 Halifax Explosion by a University of Chicago engineer, Roger MacDonald, in a research paper in 1931. The effect is due to an atmospheric rebound to such large explosions which creates a horizontal zone of overpressure.

    The Beirut Explosion looks like its power was equivalent to over 5 kilotons of TNT. In fact, the released energy was equivalent to an earthquake with a magnitude of 3.5. equal to 6.5 kilotons

    The high amount of red clouds in the blast cloud indicates hydrazine hydrate, a powerful ROCKET FUEL!!!

    This was no tactical nuclear weapon.

    If it had been, there would have been an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that would have made every vehicle’s electronics burn out within a mile of the blast centre.
    Moreover, the initial flash would have set off fires in all the buildings within a kilometre of the flash centre and created winds of 1,100 km per hour, not the 400 km per hour that we see in the video clips. Even a 5 kiloton nuclear weapons ignition temperature is over 50,000,000 ° C.
    The material was surely not ammonium nitrate because that would have made a whitish grey blast cloud. In the Iron Ore Company in Labrador, Canada, they used to fire of 249,000 kg of ammonium nitrate every second day at 12:00pm in their production shots at the mine pit. It’s very clear what 249 tons of “AN/FO” (ammonium nitrate and fuel oil) looks like when fired off.

    So what could have exploded?

    A stockpile is a mix of blasting agents such as Semtex, TNT, gelignite and such with propellants such as guncotton, hydrazine and such. There was an audible series of explosions before the big explosion, but truly a spectrographic analysis of the video clip is required to identify particulars.

    However, there’s no way that was a “fertilizer explosion,” despite the raving commentaries by so many Jew-haters.

    Ra’anan Elozory is a Jerusalem educator and former film editor who is a promoter of truth in media, who has intel sources he cannot disclose.” “