WARNING: Violence
Surveillance videos of the bombing in Nashville are cropping up from all over. I’m able to keep a certain detachment from what’s happening by focusing my interest on the explosion and its effects, and hypothesizing how it was arranged.
The perpetrator, who has now been identified, appears to have either not been trying to kill himself, or to have missed a trick: one of the reasons McVeigh’s bomb in Oklahoma City was so effective was because he parked his truck in a location where the blast was directed up and inward. This guy parked on the street like a normal vehicle, so much of the blast went up and down the street, and into the sky. If his target was the AT&T building, why didn’t he break one more law and go up the sidewalk? It would have made the difference between blowing the front off the building, and completely collapsing it.
In the video, a few seconds before this screenshot, a cop was walking by the lane dividers in the foreground, heading toward the camera’s position. Two seconds later, the bomb goes off.
Screenshots of the explosion aren’t very interesting – it’s just a bright ball that overloads the camera’s CCD. What happens next, though, is we get a good illustration of how far the fireball reached:
“Holy shit!” comes to mind.
Ammonium nitrate has a detonation speed of over 10,000 feet/second, which makes it a high explosive. Compare that to black powder, which explodes at around 700 feet/second, depending on its grain structure. The damage done by high explosive is a combination of that the energy gets dumped into the initial shock impulse more thoroughly (it’s a spike, not a wave) and things that might be able to deform slightly under a less severe impulse – tend to shatter. Military explosives, such as C4, explode in the ballpark of 30,000 feet/second. The frame above is the frame after the initial blast, so it took 1/30 of a second for the fireball to travel down the block and reach the camera.
The point of that being, that bricks and mortar turn to powder in the presence of that kind of shockwave. The fronts of all the buildings nearby are rubble. The AT&T building is the big red thing. It appears to be one of the 1970s-edition AT&T centers, which sprang up around the US during the protests in the 60s. The building is damaged, but not so much.
This is the damage to the other side of the street from the AT&T building:
The buildings have open front porticos – if the truck had been parked close to them, they would have collapsed, like the Murragh building did in the Oklahoma City bombing. As it was, the AT&T building doesn’t look that badly damaged (though doubtless there was a lot of shock inside) [Update: the FBI is looking into whether the bomber believed the government is run by alien lizard-men. Really.]
TITANPOINTE in NYC; AT&T’s armored building that is the main east coast listening post for NSA communications intercepts
I first started to realize that the surveillance state was a thing back in the 80s when I asked questions about a building in Baltimore that had a big steel blast tambour they lowered in front, every night. It was an AT&T building, too – apparently built to be able to withstand civil unrest. I guess it’s good that the government and its subsidiaries were prepared for the worst, unfortunately I think that they were preparing to, you know, keep spying on the people and not stop even if the peasants did the pitchforks and torches thing.
4 seconds. That’s all it took. You can see that the camera’s angle is changed; presumably whatever it was attached to got bent by the blast. Interestingly, some of the street lights did not fail. Explosions do weird things – some spots act as foci and are utterly pulverized, while others are in the shadow of something else, and only get back-blast and flying object damage.
I’m really glad that the bomber did not wait until the street was crowded with socially-distancing people; that would have been horrific. When the CIA does a drone strike, they aim for the crowds.
This is nothing anybody should inflict on anyone.
Another example:
Police investigate deliberate spoiling of 500 vaccine doses
You sound incredulous. And yet, you have seen Stephen Miller.
As someone who has lived in Nashville for nearly 30 years, it’s eerie to watch the footage. I’ve probably been in shops and restaurants in everyone of those buildings other than AT&T at some point (prior to the Disneyfication – or Opryfication, if you will – of downtown). Nearly all of them have condos in the higher floors and it astounds me that no one was killed. I’m no fan of the police, but kudos to the NPD officers that managed to get everyone out of there. Too bad the NPD didn’t also investigate more intently 16 months prior when the bomber’s girlfriend reported that he was making bombs in his RV. I’m sure that had nothing to do with him being white, though, right?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh that is nothing. I’ve seen an explanation for what happened to which my reaction was, everyone who agrees with this needs to be treated in a closed mental health facility.
Those images we see? CGI in an attempt to cover up that missile(s) were fired at the AT&T building. Missiles that deviated from their course and hit the recreational vehicle/mobile home instead of the AT&T building.
And why was a missile strike needed? The AT&T building contained Dominion/Smartmatic voting machines that were going to be inspected to explain why they were blatantly counting Trump votes as Biden votes.
I don’t think I need to point out the holes in this, seeing that just about every line of that reasoning contains some (why CGI an explosion when the missiles hit the RV/MH for example).
Are we sure that the bomber didn’t just really hate fondue?
“Are we sure that the bomber didn’t just really hate fondue?”
That would be ridiculous, fondue is generally beloved. Maybe he hated bad puns. Or thought the fondue place was engaged in child prostitution and human trafficking.
Another victim of the youtube algorithm. Wonder how much InfoWars that guy watched. Earlier this year I met a fellow german while hiking. 40 year old cook, his brain was completely melted by online conspiracy theories. Trump a Jesus like figure, jewish elites control everything (but according to him not all Jews are bad, only a few). Politics is corrupt and thats why we need direct democracy or better a monarchy. Billionaires control everything but taxes are bad, because it’s communism. He had incredible voilent fantasies of what to do with Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel. Poor guy lost his job because of Covid.
My word, what happened to the cop who was lucky enough to walk away in time? The lane divider he was standing next to just seconds before was instantly snapped in half.
The perpetrator… appears to have either not been trying to kill himself, or to have missed a trick…
I saw a report that the cams showed the RV arriving at (iirc) 1:22 am, about 5 hours before the blast. If Anthony Warner intended a getaway, he must have had a stroke/whatever on arrival, or seriously overestimated his own agility.
“Interestingly, some of the street lights did not fail. Explosions do weird things – some spots act as foci and are utterly pulverized, while others are in the shadow of something else, and only get back-blast and flying object damage.”
Strange indeed. As garnetstar already pointed out, the explosion destroyed exactly one of the divider poles. It was probably taken down by debris as it looks like someone took an axe to it. The youtube video you posted supports slow playback but its not enought to really see what happens. Maybe that fiery spiral is a piece of shrapnel? (That stupid popup-bar with more videos you don’t want to watch because you just paused the effing viedo to see gets in the way as usual)
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Pierce R. Butler (#8): “If Anthony Warner intended a getaway, he must have had a stroke/whatever on arrival, or seriously overestimated his own agility.”
Not necessarily. It might easily have taken that long to finalise things, the prep-work ending in a terminally wrong move. Neither an expert on explosions (see above) or explosives, I’d assume you don’t finish building your unstable explosive and then start driving some distance to your destination. Not if you have an inconspicous delivery vehicle where you can arrive first and then put everything together, possibly with a long fuse and every intention to leave before it reaches the end. Or Warner was just waiting for the “right moment”, which doesn’t say anything about his plans for survival. Some people value punctuality. Some people build bombs. There might be some overlap.
@9
youtube-dl plus vlc helps there.
Clearly not here, as he just made himself extremely late.