Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media
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TECHNICAL NOTE
Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media S. E. Rigby1
· T. J. Lodge1
· S. Alotaibi1 · A. D. Barr1
· S. D. Clarke1
· G. S. Langdon1
· A. Tyas1
Received: 25 August 2020 / Revised: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 7 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Rapid, accurate assessment of the yield of a large-scale urban explosion will assist in implementing emergency response plans, will facilitate better estimates of areas at risk of high damage and casualties, and will provide policy makers and the public with more accurate information about the event. On 4 August 2020, an explosion occurred in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon. Shortly afterwards, a number of videos were posted to social media showing the moment of detonation and propagation of the resulting blast wave. In this article, we present a method to rapidly calculate explosive yield based on analysis of 16 videos with a clear line-of-sight to the explosion. The time of arrival of the blast is estimated at 38 distinct positions, and the results are correlated with well-known empirical laws in order to estimate explosive yield. The best estimate and reasonable upper limit of the 2020 Beirut explosion determined from this method are 0.50 kt TNT and 1.12 kt TNT, respectively. Keywords Beirut explosion · Blast · Social media · Time of arrival · Yield estimation
1 Introduction On 4 August 2020, a series of explosions occurred in the Port of Beirut, Lebanon, widely reported to have been caused by detonation of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate (approximately 2750 tonnes) following a fire in the warehouse where it was being stored. The final and largest explosion caused considerable damage to the surrounding area and at the time of writing resulted in at least 181 deaths and over 6000 injuries. Shortly after the explosion, social media users began sharing videos showing the initial fire, detonation, and propagating blast wave. In many of these videos, the moment of detonation and blast wave time of arrival (ta ) at the observer’s position and/or recognisable landmarks are clearly discernible from the footage and audio. Thus, these videos Communicated by A. Higgins and E. Timofeev. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-020-00970-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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make it possible to approximately determine the time of arrival of the shock front at different distances from the source of the explosion. In this article, we examine 16 videos posted online [1–16]1 at various locations across the city of Beirut (Fig. 1). We correlate the calculated distance–time relationship with well-known semi-empirical laws [17] in order to estimate the approximate yield of the 2020 Beirut explosion by minimising the mean absolute error between the data and semi-empirical predictions. There is a pressing need for rapid, accurate assessment of the size of the explosive yield in such events, both to infor
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