Parchin Blast Site Far From Disputed Chamber

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Yesterday, I described what was known at the time about a mysterious blast near the Parchin military site in Iran. I postulated that satellite imagery would soon be available to help sort out the mystery of what took place. A tweet this afternoon from @dravazed alerted me to this article at the Times of Israel, which, in turn, linked to this story posted at israeldefense.com.

Satellite imagery described as from Sunday night’s blast at the Israel Defense site shows several buildings destroyed. The article claims that the blast looks like an attack on a bunker:

Satellite images obtained by Israel Defense and analyzed by specialist Ronen Solomon clearly show damage consistent with an attack against bunkers in a central locality within the military research complex at the Parchin military compound.

Because of the unique shape of the large building adjacent to those destroyed by the blast, I was able to find the location of the blast on Google Maps. Also, with the help of this article from 2012 in The Atlantic, I was able to locate both the area inspected by IAEA in 2005 and the site of the disputed blast chamber where it is alleged that research to develop a high explosive fuse for a nuclear weapon has been carried out. None of these three locations, the blast site, the chamber site or the area inspected in 2005, lies within the boundaries marked as Parchin on Google Maps. The blast site looks to be near a populated area of what is marked on Google Maps as Mojtame-e Maskuni-ye Parchin (which appears to translate as Parchin Residential Complex A if I used Google Translate appropriately). In fact, the blast site appears to be just over a mile from an athletic field. On the map below, #1 is the disputed blast chamber location, #2 is the blast site and #3 is the area inspected in 2005. Note that both the blast chamber site and the area inspected in 2005 are more removed from what appear to be the populated areas.

Final

I am far from an image analysis expert, but the blast site looks to me to be more like an industrial site than a cache for storing explosives. If a bunker were indeed located here, that would put the local planning in this area on a par with West, Texas.

It will be very interesting to see how US officials describe the damage and the site where it occurred.

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18 replies
  1. bloopie2 says:

    And, like West, Texas, we may never know what really goes on there. Hasn’t the state of Texas passed a law that says the residents there have no right to know what goes on in their local chemical plants? Protecting the business, of course.

    • GulfCoastPirate says:

      No, no, no. Our honorable state reps didn’t pass the law so us citizens wouldn’t know what was going on. They passed it because if we citizens knew then the terrorists would also know and we can’t have that.

      Or so they said …………………..

  2. P J Evans says:

    Explosives storage areas usually have the bunkers far enough apart so that if one goes up, the rest won’t. See, for example, Seal Beach NWS, which has at least three sets of bunkers.

    • chronicle says:

      Hahahahahaha! ISIS.. had me going for a minute or two. But I’m still trying to figure this out:

      quote”Yesterday, I described what was known at the time about a mysterious blast near the Parchin military site in Iran”unquote

      IRAN. Ok, but then there’s this right after it:

      quote”Satellite imagery described as from Sunday night’s blast at the Israel Defense site shows several buildings destroyed.”unquote

      Sunday night’s blast at the Israel Defense site? umm, what am I missing here? Perhaps it’s just worded weird?

      • Jim White says:

        .
        Yeah, I was writing fast because I was supposed to be cooking dinner. The blast was in the Parchin area and the photos of the aftermath were at the Israel Defense website.
        .
        It’s still disturbing that their “expert” talked in terms of the blast being consistent with an “attack” on a bunker. How is the signature of an attack any different from that of an accident, at least at the level of image resolution we have available?

        • chronicle says:

          quote”Yeah, I was writing fast because I was supposed to be cooking dinner.”unquote

          Shame on you. Moonlighting on home company time. You’re wife will be furious. Heaven forbid…she might even fire you. Next time..clock out. Or else.

          bartender.. pour me a shot of LOL.

  4. Adam Colligan says:

    It’s possible that part of the problem here is this throwaway line from your original piece:
    .

    …translates to say the blast was at a waste tire warehouse. It is very hard to see how burning tires could produce such a large explosion…

    .
    Industrial tire recycling by pyrolysis creates a whole mess of explosive hydrogen and hydrocarbon gasses. (http://www.energy-without-carbon.org/sites/default/files/tyre%20pyrolysis.PNG ). It’s often an environment that is not managed safely (http://www.pyrolysisplant.com/safety-concerns-in-batch-type-tire-pyrolysis-plants/ ). And the same processes can create explosive concoctions even in tires that are just overheated, such as in a firey depot, even when there isn’t an organized pyrolysis treatment going on. This is what one big tire can do by itself (https://www.icmm.com/document/4721). Iranian companies and researchers have been pursuing pyrolysis, and they also have a huge number of scrap tires. A quick Google search will show you a number of Iranian firms and Chinese/Indian partners trading in tire pyrolysis products and machinery as well as Iranian articles about experimental improvements with the processes.
    .
    That doesn’t mean that’s really what happened on this site, but I don’t understand why you were so dismissive of the idea up front.

    • chronicle says:

      quote” Iranian companies and researchers have been pursuing pyrolysis, and they also have a huge number of scrap tires. A quick Google search will show you a number of Iranian firms and Chinese/Indian partners trading in tire pyrolysis products and machinery as well as Iranian articles about experimental improvements with the processes.”unquote

      OMG. Iran tires=WMD!!! Quick… time to institute TIRE sanctions!!! Of all the nerve.. next thing we know the terrorists will target NYC taxi cab tires… sheeesh. The whole city may burn to the ground!! Run for your lives!!

    • Jim White says:

      .
      Perhaps. But in the “before” pictures of the site, there certainly isn’t a large stack of used tires outdoors that would be fed into the process. The really large building next to the primary building that blew up could house lots of them, but indoor storage sounds expensive.
      .
      Cheryl Rofer and I had a Twitter discussion about the site. We agree the buildings are too close together for a site intended for work with high explosives. I think that would also apply to siting a pyrolysis facility, too, if they are known to be an explosion risk.
      .
      Many of the adjacent buildings have structures on the roof that could be exhaust stacks for chemical fume handling. Also, a number of the buildings close by are interconnected with a large series of above-ground pipes. But the main building that blew up didn’t have roof stacks and it didn’t have above-ground pipes running into that I could see. Rofer speculated that natural gas might have been involved in the explosion.
      .
      I’m also troubled about how several buildings could be blown away and yet we see no structural damage to the really large building that appears to have been quite close to the blast center.

  5. Don Bacon says:

    Iran news sources IRNA, Mehr, Khabar and FARA have no mention of any blast at Parchin. I guess we’ll have to go with the Israel media, ISIS and NYTimes. There are no other reports.
    .
    Regarding the NYTimes, and its article by Thomas Erdbrink, there have been no follow-ups by the Times’s Tehran rep. Also Erdbrink has been silent on his twitter account about it. Curious.
    .
    Have we been had??

  6. Don Bacon says:

    We should not allow Iran to produce tires with more than 20% rubber, and limit them to a thousand rubber enrichment machines. Anything else is a threat to mankind [if we discount the fourteen US-led killer wars against Muslims].

  7. Don Bacon says:

    I fixed it.
    .
    “Satellite imagery described at the Israel Defense site as from Sunday night’s blast at the Israel Defense site shows several buildings destroyed.”

      • chronicle says:

        wtf??? hmmm, I didn’t even touch the “reply” button. Must be a ghost in the machine. Anyway..as I was saying…

        quote”Fox News finally picked it up!

        Mysterious blast at fertilizer plant proves weapons of fart gas program still alive. “unquote

        there…fixed it.

    • Bob Kelley says:

      It is obviously a fire in a chemical processing building in a chemical prep part of the site. That is what we said in Jane’s

      But Don, you have not replied to my questions about you and Fred Dahl and your obsession with tungsten.

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