>The explosive used in 95% of all commercial blasting is ANFO, a mixture of
>94.5% fertilizer grade ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) and 5.5% Diesel oil,
>if you want to make a lot you can make it in a cement mixer.
>When NH4NO3
>explodes it produces N2O and 2H2O, N2O (laughing gas) is a powerful oxidant,
>so when it combines with Diesel oil it considerably increases it's yield.
>ANFO is rather slow as explosives go and the pressure wave is only about 35%
>as high as Dynamite, but it does have three advantages, it's very stable,
>it's easy to make, and it's very cheap, about 9 cents a pound.
>I don't think there is any doubt that ANFO can bring down a building if
> you have enough of it, even straight NH4NO3 can be dangerous.
Sam Gronning, a licensed, professional blaster in Casper,
Wyoming with 30 years experience in explosives, told us
the Partin letter "states in very precise technical terms
what everyone in this business knows: No truck bomb of ANFO
[ammonium nitrate fuel oil] out in the open is going to cause
the kind of damage we had there" in Oklahoma City. "In 30 years
of blasting, using everything from 100 percent nitrogel to ANFO,
I've not seen anything to support that story."
>In 1947 a ship in
>Texas City Texas was being loaded with paper pages filled with ammonium
>nitrate fertilizer. Somehow a fire started in the hold of the ship, the
>crew then sealed the hold, apparently thinking that would smother the fire,
>instead it caused so much heat and pressure that the fertilizer exploded.
>People 10 miles away in Galveston were knocked to the ground, at least
>600 people died and many thousands were injured.
Gronning notes that he recently detonated an ANFO charge more
than three times the size of the one reportedly responsible
for the Oklahoma destruction. "I set off 16,000 pounds of
ANFO and was standing upright just 1,000 feet away from
the blast," and even a bomb that size would not have
caused the destruction experienced in the April 19th
explosion, he said.
Other supporting testimony.
http://www.tncnet.com/~rsears/oak/explode.html
The ship must have had millions of tons, and or, it created a pressure
cooker effect that magnified explosive power, just as if you opened a
boiling pressure cooker -- boom.
Law of Identity: A is A, relative to not-A. A = (A + ~A)
Law of Nonidentity: If there is 100% A, there is 0% A. A = ~A
absolute reality: http://www.erols.com/igoddard/reality.html