A Russian ship with 20,000 tonnes of explosive cargo has been spotted off of the Kent coast today.
The Malta-flagged cargo ship is nicknamed the ‘Ruby’, but dubbed a ‘floating bomb’, was stocked with cargo in Russia in late August, before making its way towards the UK coast.
The ship had docked in Tromsø, Norway, where residents became panicked about the sheer amount of explosives stocked on board.
The Ruby is carrying ammonium nitrate – around seven times more than the 2,750 tonnes which devastated the port of Beirut in 2020.
The nitrate detonated when a fire broke out in the warehouse where it was being stored.
The chemical is highly dangerous. As well as being widely used in agriculture, the chemical is also commonly used in mining and civil construction.
In some cases, it has been used in explosives having been used to make bombs in a number of terrorist attacks in recent decades because it is cheap and easy to obtain.
It was used in the IRA bomb attacks on the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate in the City Of London in 1992 and 1993, as well as the car bomb which struck Docklands in 1996, and in the Manchester city centre bomb attack in 1999.
Ammonium nitrate acts as an oxidiser, meaning that it draws oxygen to a fire, and can make it much more intense as a result.
However it is quite difficult for it to actually ignite, normally only doing so at very high temperatures.
If it burns, the compound releases gases including nitrogen oxides and water vapour – and it’s this which can lead to a violent explosion as these gases build up and are then rapidly released.
Although any chemicals released into the air may quickly disperse, they can cause problems in other ways – for example, if it rains, the chemicals could cause the rain to be acidic.
Ammonium nitrate has caused similar explosions in the past – including the Texas City Disaster of 1947, when almost nearly 500 people were killed in an explosion caused by over 2,000 tonnes of the chemical.
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