Satellite images of the Beirut explosion site – before and after

If we're talking about UI/UX then there kinda is.

It's the UI that the largest proportion of your target audience would find intuitive if they tried it.

So it's not the lack of an objective answer that's the problem, it's the difficulty of finding a proxy for your target audience and a testing process you can afford.

Sometimes the proxy is "you" and the testing is "your experience and intuition" and sometimes the proxy is a statistically significant number of formal user tests.

Ultimately, modern animations are just as distracting as animated Gifs were. They're somewhere between an ideal reading experience and wholly unwanted autoplay videos.

If autoplay videos are a swarm of angry hornets, animations are summertime gnats. We live with them but they're hardly something we asked for.

There's a minimum contact diameter and maximum distance to propagate an explosion. Even if you detonate one pallet of one ton of ANFO literally making a checkerboard of pallets would seem from memory to be enough to make sure the explosion does not propagate to the other pallets. Now realize this was decades ago and I was more or less a sysadmin not a warrant officer nor one of the research scientists who wrote the books full of regulations nor the geospatial analysis code. Yes one pallet of one ton of ANFO would make a mess of the forklift driver next to it, but, maybe 100 or 200 hundred feet away, other than maybe some broken windows you'd be hard pressed to tell it happened.

One of many AN production processes generates about one part calcium carbonate (limestone, essentially) to one part AN, so you could literally alternate train cars of synthetic limestone with train car loads of AN.

Bulk storage is more problematic.

A pretty good analogy is forest fires. One tree chopped into segments and catches fire is a pretty cool bonfire or camp fire which is no big deal for outdoorsmen who intelligently plan ahead. You can do that a million nights in a row and nothing bad will happen. One million trees in close proximity and if one catches fire the whole forest burns down in one night, which is a huge problem.

I don't know about this specific case, but the chronology is usually reversed. Someone gets a permit and builds a hazardous factory somewhere suitably close to a city that it has access to transportation and employees, but far enough to be safe, with adequate safety areas. Then, over time, the city needs more room and since the factory hasn't blown up yet, it seems safe enough to expand right up to it...

Orica has been fined for safety breaches in the past. But even if they are doing everything right, you need to consider the context: it's surrounded by a bunch of things that can catch fire.

There's a massive coal terminal, a fuel/petrol terminal, as well as a Fertiliser producer all within a few hundred meters of each other.

Any one of those having a bad day and Newcastle makes state news and everyone goes to watch the fire. (Like seemingly half the country did when the Pasha Bulker freighter beached right on Nobby's Beach, a few hundred meters away).

If that fire spreads, because say there's strong winds (also a common thing there) and now we have a risk of Orica's terminal going up.

Fast forward in time and the surroundings of the plant became completely urbanized at the time of the explosion.

I remember my physics teacher talking about the AZF plant risk and urbanization circa 1990 so twenty years before the explosion (I'm from the Toulouse area), so everyone knew there too.

According to Wikipedia "Stockton was settled almost as soon as the foundation of Newcastle in 1797." -- so yeah, the Orica plant was definitely established well after people were living there. It's grown a bit since, but it's definitely still very much a 'beach town vibe'.

Then of course there's the whole City of Newcastle right across the harbour. While the 1989 earthquake definitely resulted in the city hollowing out, when the Orica plant was built it was a vibrant and well populated.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/08/rhosus-beirut-ni...

https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/12907955327014256...

Melting point: 169.6 °C

> It was also intended that the munition could be used against targets in coastal and near-coastal locations. One person carrying the weapon package would parachute from an aircraft and place the device in a harbor or other strategic location that was accessible from the sea. Another parachutist without a weapon package would follow the first to provide support as needed. The two-man team would place the weapon package in the target location, set the timer, and swim out into the ocean, where they would be retrieved by a submarine or a high-speed surface water craft.