Apparently, Ukrainian drones pushed through and started a chain reaction.
Explosions reportedly continued for hours, and authorities evacuated nearby settlements. Initial reports indicate that the site, previously protected by one of Russia’s densest air defense networks, suffered catastrophic damage.
I’m pretty sure competent militaries store their munitions in networks of dozens if not hundreds of earthen bunkers per site, specifically so shit like this can’t happen.
264 kilotons is a fuckload of bombs.
I assume that bunkers protect you from a chain reaction, but that at some point the explosion is big enough that a chain reaction is exactly what you get.
This definitely seems like it would have been big enough to cause a chain reaction (and/or big enough to show that a chain reaction happened). If so, I wonder what fraction of bunkers exploded. I’m glad we live in an age of civilian satellites, so it’s probably just a matter of time before we get to see the damage for ourselves.
Competent ones, I think they do.
Possible explanations:
yet another time, someone had set money aside for personal use, consequently the bunkers had doors made of plywood or roofing tin :)
arrival of drones was timed to match the loading / unloading of an ammunition train (that’s when even competent militaries have to bring their stuff out)
That’s a very nice way to say “embezzle”.
A bullet train, you say?
!fuckcars@lemmy.world breaks down the door
In their infinite wisdom they apparently stored a bunch of ammunitions out in the open.
Russia has a long history of open storage at these sites. They also lost a ton of bunkers a few months ago at other sites. So they likely did not have much of an option, and they chose open store it at their “best defended” base.
I personally would bet that site was overstocked as it was likely the primary ammo dump by default. All of the newly manufactured missiles and shells going there directly from the factories.
But you can save money by putting all of them in one place
It could hold that much, but according to Ukraine it was 105000 tons that exploded. Huge success though.
I’m making a note here.
Assuming I’m looking at the right thing on google maps, it does seem to be a lot of earthen bunkers with berms separating them. There are also quite a few free standing buildings scattered around.
I looked at Hawthorne Army Depot (US) to compare, and that one is a lot less dense, but it’s absolutely gigantic.
That’s like ten small nukes.
They may not have enough manpower to guard a more distributed site, especially if they’re afraid of internal groups seizing some of it.
Competent being the key word in that sentence, and not an accurate one based on the last few years of intel.
I guess we don’t have an accurate source on what percentage of munitions his was.
I would confidently assume 100% of it was munitions
If you think of the fill percentage, I think that’s too optimistic, since they’re in a war. There is constant demand. However, even 50% would be an extremely big amount, and relieve Ukrainians from a lot of pressure (last year, when a similar thing happened in Toropets, it had effects on the front within weeks). This time, from the videos I saw, there was enough to keep detonating for a long time.
Whatever the fill percentage and loss percentage, the site is closed for a long time - if something remains, it cannot be reached, it has to be examined and re-certified. But more likely, very little will remain.
In the coming days, satellite photos will tell what the situation is.
I think they meant 100% of the explosions were munitions, not 100% of the munitions exploded. 'Twas a joke.