Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media

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.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Rigby, S.E. Lodge, T.J. Alotaibi, S. Barr, A.D. Clarke, S.D. Langdon, G.S. Tyas, A.
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2020. Open Access: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Keywords:	Beirut explosion; Blast; Social media; Time of arrival; Yield estimation
Dates:	Published: 22 September 2020 Published (online): 22 September 2020 Accepted: 7 September 2020
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Engineering (Sheffield) > Department of Civil and Structural Engineering (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	07 Sep 2020 07:54
Last Modified:	25 Jan 2022 17:41
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1007/s00193-020-00970-z
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:165010

CORE (COnnecting REpositories)

Preliminary yield estimation of the 2020 Beirut explosion using video footage from social media

Abstract

Metadata

Download

Published Version

Export

Statistics