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.

Historically, most testing with shallow buried charges has focussed on soils which are predominantly quartz (silica)-based. Particle size, moisture content and density have previously been investigated to ascertain their importance, along with other geotechnical parameters, in governing the magnitude of an impulsive output. This has shown that, in order of importance, moisture content, density and particle size drive the total impulse imparted. The work in this paper presents the results of blast testing carried out with carbonate sands to investigate the difference that particle mineralogy (and hence, propensity for breakage) has on both the localised loading and the total impulse using an array of 17 Hopkinson pressure bars known as the Characterisation of Blast Loading (CoBL) apparatus. Carbonate sands are thought to have more friable particles due to their plate-like morphology, as opposed to the rounded morphology of quartz-based sands. Testing was conducted with low moisture content samples and compared with the well-established Leighton Buzzard uniform sand to isolate the effect of particle mineralogy/morphology on the loadings measured. The results show that, despite attaining a 23% lower bulk density, carbonate soils deliver almost identical total impulses (0.7–3.0% higher) when compared with quartz soils for nominally identical moisture contents.