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This is what the Beirut explosion radius would look like in Hamilton

Beirut – the capital of Lebanon – made the news worldwide on August 4th as a massive explosion devastated the city, injuring roughly 5,000 residents, killing 137, and causing over 5 billion dollars of damages to homes and buildings across the community.

The explosion, believed to have originated from a warehouse containing mass amounts of highly reactive materials, was large enough to impact an astonishing amount of the Lebanese capital’s geography.

To put the magnitude of the explosion’s impact into a more tangible perspective for people from outside communities, data illustrators have been painting a picture of the level of surface area and damage the same explosion could have done to other cities in different parts of the world: including here in Hamilton.

Comparison of the Beirut explosion centred at the Port of Hamilton from Hamilton

The comparison map created for Hamilton shows the explosion’s potential impact reaching as far as a 10 kilometre radius from the explosion’s point of origin, which was assigned in this example to a location by the North End waterfront for illustrative purposes.

As is made clear from the map, an explosion of the same impact in Hamilton would see a startling spread of damages, with effects shown to reach as far as Burlington, Stoney Creek, and the Hamilton Mountain from the example explosion’s origin in the North End of the lower city.

Widespread damage would be most devastating within the first kilometre’s radius of the explosion epicenter, likely destroying much of the immediate surroundings of the Burlington Street East area.

Heavy damage would also hit everything within a 6.5 kilometre radius of the explosion, including the areas around Bayfront Park, Cootes Paradise, the Royal Botanical Gardens, and the Red Hill Valley Parkway. There would also be the potential for the explosion’s impact to break windows on buildings as far as 24 kilometres from the explosion site.

While such devastation is merely conceptual for Hamilton, it’s staggering to consider the very real implications of this disaster on Beirut, its residents, its infrastructure, and its economy.

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