BREAKING: Hundreds wounded as huge explosion rips through Lebanon’s Beirut

Hundreds of people have been wounded in a powerful explosion that ripped through Lebanon’s capital, Beirut, according to the country’s health minister.

The massive explosion on Tuesday at Beirut’s port caused widespread damage to buildings, shattering windows in different parts of the city. It sent shockwaves across the capital.

Hamad Hassan, Lebanon’s health minister, said hundreds were wounded in the explosion.

Helicopters circling the port area were trying to extinguish a large fire. The captain of an Italian ship, the Orient Queen, that was docked near the explosion site, reported that several people on board were wounded and taken to hospital.

He was covered in blood after the explosion threw him across a room of his ship.

Video of the incident shows a large column of smoke billowing from an area of the port that houses large warehouses before a large orange explosion is seen and huge dome-shaped blast wave shoots into the air.

Glass storefronts and windowpanes across the city were shattered in the explosion, while videos and pictures shared on social media showed doors ripped from their hinges and ceilings filled with gaping holes.

“I can’t believe I’m still alive,” Nada Hamza, a Beirut resident, said

The wave from the explosion caused extensive damage to buildings within a large radius of the blast site.

“I was kilometers away; the glass broke everywhere around me,” said Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut.

“The explosion was felt across the city,” she added. “There is chaos in the streets.”

One explanation that was quickly given was that these are detonating fireworks from a stored cache being set off by the fire.

Another potential explanation is that this could be ammunition that is being set off and is burning as you would expect to see when ammunition is hit or is being destroyed.

The secondary explosion is more puzzling still. An early explanation was that it involved warehoused nitrates exploding, or other stored “highly explosive material” as claimed by Lebanon’s internal security chief without being more explicit.

One of the most common nitrates in industrial use is ammonium nitrate, used in fertilizers. It is not ordinarily so explosive in its own right.

When it has been used in homemade explosives, by the IRA and Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Breivik among others, it has been mixed with other materials and is often detonated with a small amount of a more conventional explosive.

And slowed down frame by frame, the video on social media shows a second, highly symmetrical blast taking place at ground level all at once, throwing up a wall of dust and then a cloud into the air and tremendous speed. It suggests the release of a huge amount of energy which in turn creates a devastating pressure wave that carries debris over a least a kilometer.

None of which is to say that this is not a terrible accident involving a freak coincidence of circumstances. The 1947 Galveston fire in Texas involved a ship carrying nitrates and a fire that released other materials into a deadly explosive mix that killed over 500 people.

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