First rainfall since Tianjin explosion leaves city covered in mysterious white foam

The rods from god theory doesn't make that much tactical sense to me in the context of a limited secret war.

Such a war would not be affected by piecemeal strategic bombing of industrial infrastructure at a rate the public could ignore, unless it went on for a decade, and there are much more covert ways to attack one non military target outside of a full scale war.

The beauty of rods from god is that you can mass-driver them into orbit in quantity and bring them down anywhere, faster, less defensible, and less escalating than a missile strike- it's basically a global artillery battery concept. If you want to strike every building the enemy leadership could possibly be in at the same time, with no evacuation time and no chance of one of your stealths being intercepted, yeah you'd definitely use that kind of weapon.

But if you want to blow up one plant, why not just give some WP rounds to a local nutjob, or bribe a security guard to let a spook in the door, or compromise their computer safety systems from home, or strap match books to fruit bats and release them in the area in daylight, or a million and one other dirty tricks in our arsenal that cost less money, don't reveal the operational status of illegal space weaponry to the public right before an election, and don't invite escalation to the use of cutting edge weapons on civilians?

If the answer is to fire a shot across China's bow by showing the new weapon to them, why not target a top secret military target to show them we have them by the balls and keep them from letting the public find out anything except that they have decided the Americans are right?

a reply to: sycomix

Almost all of what was in that warehouse explodes or has nasty side effects when exposed to water. The warehouse had sodium cyanide, which when water was used on it releases cyanide gas, potassium nitrate, amonium nitrate, calcium carbide, toluene diisocyanite, some of the amounts were in the hundreds of tons. Calcium carbide creates acetylene when exposed to water. In addition to that there was a petrochemical storage area right near where the fire occurred.

a reply to: 200Plus

I love the trolling man.. Excellent work throwing gas on this conspiracy fire already out of control.

a reply to: AshFan

Thank god someone brought out the too #ing ridiculous to believe conspiracy fire extinguisher... I was worried for about .005 seconds

If there's any conspiracy to that disaster, it's likely among the Chinese themselves. Somebody inside the operation would have seen a powder-keg waiting to go off, and would have used it to play the commodities market in the production of various goods. (I'd think mostly electronics, as that's what China is good at these days. Stuff in rechargable batteries or on circuit boards is not friendly at all when burnt.) If anything like that is found, knowing how China handles things those people will be thrown in front of a firing squad if they're not on the run already.

As for the residue, probably a soap compound or grease formed after water reacts with various metal salts. There's probably a lot of nasty fall-out they're being quite mum about. Probably because the kind of stuff Zaphod58 mentioned.

originally posted by: AshFan
a reply to: YeahYea4

Probably carbon fiber wire controlled targeting with onsite sabotage fire started to distract people and assist in targeting.

BOOM

Probably you're just elaborating on your existing theory with yet more unfounded nonsense when inconvenient facts emerge making your conspiracy obvious nonsense.

Common sense would dictate that if they could cause a fire to "create a distraction" then they wouldn't need to use any weapon, especially one they would presumably want to keep top secret.

If they could start the fire, why then use a top secret weapon to create an explosion they want to disguise as being caused by a fire?

Do you not see how ridiculous this nonsense is?

And in response to the OP, I believe what we're seeing is the result of contamination over a wide area caused by dust and ash containing chemical compounds. I believed in the beginning that the exclusion zone should have been larger, with testing for chemical agents carried out in the days after across several KM. This explosion has basically blasted a massive area with massive amounts of dangerously toxic chemicals, and now that the rain has arrived it's going to be creating more problems, specifically with those chemicals seeping into the groundwater and potentially contaminating drinking supplies.

originally posted by: pauljs75
If there's any conspiracy to that disaster, it's likely among the Chinese themselves.

And this is being exposed gradually as we speak.
There were reports today that the company was operating illegally up until about 4 or 5 months ago.
They were also in breach of laws requiring sites like that to be a certain distance from residential buildings, and in breach of the maximum allowable level of chemicals stored.

Basically, it now looks as though this was an entirely illegal company breaking every law they could.
Now the attention is (rightly) going to fall on the local authorities who allowed this to happen and seemingly didn't do their jobs. Someone signed off on all of this, and someone in the local authority of the district either took a bribe or just looked the other way while these laws were ignored.

Thankfully, the people are damn angry and demanding answers. Unlike in the past, it seems the Chinese government is slowly bowing to pressure too. Although there is still a hell of a lot of censorship in China, the government seems to be slowly moving in the right direction and realizing that doing nothing in response to this would not be acceptable by the people.

The people are going to be demanding that heads roll for this, and I can't see the Chinese government arguing about that as they might have done in the past.
Maybe it's because these citizens are more middle-class and in a seemingly more affluent area of the country (as opposed to the poorer farming communities the Chinese government sh**s all over to rob them of their land), but whatever the reason the government seems to be more on their side than the world might have expected.

Hey, I thought that the US might be mad about the devaluation of currency that will ultimately lead to ww3. THATS ALL!

can a massive build up of explosive chemicals cause such an explosion? it made a water crater didnt it? since its a mystery to us what exactly was being stored there could they have been storing explosives for bombs or weapons? wasn't it like 25tons of tnt?

a reply to: AshFan

Why would the US go after China for Devaluating the currency when the US is at fault for the Devaluation.

China Saved the US from it's crash by buying the Debt, a port explosion in China wouldn't effect the US currency anyways.

a reply to: krossfyter

It was the equivalent of 25 tons of TNT. The amounts of chemicals, the types, and the petrochemical storage nearby would give a massive explosion.

talk about off topic..

after a chemical explosion in china and now white foam appearing after rain majority of this thread is about currency devaluation, rods from god.

doesnt anyone have anything to write about the sodium cyanide / water foam thats appearing?

a reply to: Hijinx

I agree with Hijinx and Rocker2013. This has nothing to do with currency devaluation, and If there is any other conspiracy at work here, it is on China, not the US.

originally posted by: YeahYea4
a reply to: AshFan

So you would add a guidance system to your Rod of God?...

My rod of god is self guiding

(THUD!!)