@BuckeyeTexan ,
@Sanguine .
@A-Lert ~~~~~~~~~~~
CAVEAT: As a scientist, I will deal with the questions of
"Where?",
"What?",
"How?", and, "When". The questions of
"Who?". and
"Why?" -- I leave to law enforcement and those who deal in conspiracy theories...
~~~~~~~~~~~
I just found "new" post-blast OHI that approximately matches this Google Earth view of the area of blast focus at West:
...and am
"georeferencing" (fancy term for
"matching and aligning") it to this "before" image. (The site is so obliterated by blast and "cleanup" damage that we must provide our own, accurate "landmarks" in order to do credible spatial analysis...)
Notice the yellow-overtinted building. That is where the ATF says the focus of the blast was. (The yellow polygon {or its outline} will be propagated "upward" as a "landmark" as we add layers of post-blast imagery...)
Now,
notice the practice of parking semi-trailer trucks loaded with Ammonium Nitrate ("AN") right on the tracks of the plant's rail spur that runs to the east of the mainline RR tracks.
From various bits of evidence (cratering, debris scatter patterns, displacement of mainline RR rails, etc., I hypothesized that
there was a center of explosion north of the building -- aligned with the railroad spur. Last Thanksgiving, I finally had a chance to visit the site (which is mostly obliterated now), and found what I expected: distinctive evidence of a center of explosion atop the rail spur:
Railroad rails are designed to be their
strongest in the vertical plane, because they must not only withstand heavy loads, but also the trip-hammer-like pounding of thousands of loaded steel wheels passing over them -- at speed.
That rail is sheared from the top down. (Whereas, as you will see, the rails on the main line were bent so far
laterally that the eastern rail almost touched the western rail...) That was one hellaciously powerful vertical "punch"!
The above rail and its sheared, bent laterally, and rolled-over partner, are broken along a line just north of (and parallelling) the shadow of the semi-trailer parked alongside the building, above...
To the north,there is another pair of sheared rail ends -- just about where the front bumper of the northern truck -- parked by the big, circular AN bin for loading -- crosses the rails of the spur.
Between those two points -- the rails, crossties, spikes, etc of that spur are totally missing!~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh -- that diagonal red line? That's a
Google Earth "stitch line" -- where two image "tiles" or "panes" dont quite line up. I had "sliced" the image along that line and had shifted the halves so that "minor details" like railroad tracks and spurs line up properly -- when
"Canvas Draw 2", my "graphics engine", barfed and destroyed my work. So... there will be a silght delay while I recover...
