NFPA Journal - November/December 2020 - 19

Africa, told NFPA Journal following the
incident. The blast killed nearly 200
people and leveled buildings in a twomile radius.
While the new analysis shows the
Beirut explosion was much more powerful than other notable ammonium nitrate
explosions in the past-it generated
roughly 100 times more energy than the
2013 ammonium nitrate explosion at a
fertilizer facility in West, Texas, according to media reports-it still fell short of
the largest non-nuclear explosion in history, the December 1917 explosion in the
port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. According
to a book published on the incident in
1994, the Halifax explosion, which killed
over 1,600 people, packed the equivalent of more than 3,000 tons of TNT,
nearly four times higher than the Beirut
explosion estimate.
To read the full University of Sheffield analysis of the Beirut explosion,
go to nfpa.org/dispatches and select
"International News."
Ulsan, South Korea
New effort aims to quantify problem of
high-rise facade fires
Nearly 100 people were injured in October as flames raced up the facade of a
33-story high-rise in Ulsan, South Korea.
As Birgitte Messerschmidt, director of

Applied Research at NFPA, watched the
news unfold, she knew the blaze was
another in a long line of fires involving combustible exterior wall systems, including
facades. "It was just classic, with the fire
spreading up the building quickly and huge
chunks falling off," Messerschmidt said.
Coincidentally, the South Korea fire
came on the heels of the release in September of a new online list of high-rise
facade fires. The list, which was compiled
by researchers at Imperial College in
London and is housed on Wikipedia, represents an important step in quantifying the
global problem of high-rise facade fires.
"It's a simple start to try to answer this
question of how many fires like that are
out there," Messerschmidt said. "If we can
get information about not only the larger
incidents but also the smaller ones, that's
valuable, because maybe it was smaller
because there was effective construction
or a sprinkler system in place."
With individuals anywhere able to add
incidents to the list, the effort also represents the first time a practice known as
citizen science is being used to look into
a fire problem, Messerschmidt said. Messerschmidt wrote about the lack of data
pertaining to facade fires in a May/June
article in NFPA Journal, "Data Void," available online at nfpa.org/facades.
Access the full Wikipedia list by going to
nfpa.org/dispatches and selecting "International News."

AP/WIDE WORLD

QUANTIFIABLE
A high-rise apartment fire in South
Korea in October underscored the
need to collect additional data on
facade fires worldwide.

Facebook, and other social media platforms. Researchers used that video,
combined with audio and satellite imagery, to determine the speed and power
of the explosion.
The blast occurred when a fire
caused nearly 3,000 metric tons of
ammonium nitrate, a common ingredient in fertilizer, to destabilize and
explode. The ammonium nitrate had
been stored in a warehouse in the city's
port for several years, despite warnings from officials that it was unsafe.
"Six million pounds of a dangerous
material like that sitting in a dynamic
environment like a port for six years is
an accident waiting to happen. And it
happened," Anas Alzaid, NFPA's representative to the Middle East and North

N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

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NFPA Journal - November/December 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - November/December 2020
