Welders set off Beirut blast while securing explosives | Hacker News Reader

Welders set off Beirut blast while securing explosives

maritime-executive.com

632 pointstafda518 comments

We were 600 meters away from the blast walking peacefully in the popular Beirut street Mar Mikhael. The scale of the explosion was surreal [1]. I hugged my sister and thought it’s our last moment. We miraculously survived with only a few scratches. Ten days have passed and there’s not a single minute I don’t think of what happened and emulate different scenarios where I could’ve died. I also work at the most affected hospital that became instantly non-operational and had to be evacuated with over 17 patients, staff, and visitors dead [2].

Please consider donating [3].

[1] https://youtu.be/SkIYjNGiaoA

[2] https://youtu.be/JIxuwE_WPXw

[3] https://www.stgeorgehospital.org/stgeorge-donation

I'm sorry that you had to go through this.

Is your house damaged? News reports showed several buildings which didn't bore the direct brunt of the blast have become structurally weakened by the shockwaves and that there are less chances that those buildings would be repaired.

If you are living in such a building, it would be wise to move away to a safer building far away if possible.

Thank you. My house is 4km away and didn't sustain any damage. However other buildings within the same range had their glass shattered. The blast was even heard in Cyprus (234 km). NASA's ARIA team mapped the likely extent of damage: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasa-maps-beirut-blast-dama...

I also went up to the hospital's helipad today and can see the massive crater in direct sight: https://imgur.com/FAtIo4F

Glad that your house didn't suffer damage.

Supposedly, more than 70,000 building have been damaged[1].

The news report also mentions that there is trouble withdrawing money from the banks and that the funds don't reach people. Can you please confirm that the hospital donation link can accept international funds and that the funds really reach to those who need it?

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyEvcmQ8ObA

True, thousands were left homeless. This disaster could not have occurred at a worse time for Lebanon. Hospitals are already at their maximum capacities due to the COVID-19, and the country is in an unprecedented economic crisis... The donations will go primarily into rebuilding the hospital in order to serve the community again. If the donation by card does not work, please consider using the bank account wire transfer (Outside of Lebanon IBAN).

I wish you a speedy physical and metal recovery. Please consider getting counseling as there is a good chance you might experience symptoms of PTSD and early therapy after a traumatic experience can be a lot more effective than similar work down the line.

Thank you for your kind words. The hospital's psychiatry department already setup a nearby clinic for free support to all healthcare workers.

> there is a good chance you might experience symptoms of PTSD and early therapy after a traumatic experience

i think massive traumatic events also result in a kind of PTSD at the level of population, and unfortunately there is not much we know what to do with it.

Couple other notes. The conspiracy theory is that the Mozambique destination was just a cover, and the AN was intended for Hezbollah. The Hezbollah affiliated company tried to buy the arrested AN, and failing that, Hezbollah was also stealing that AN which was conveniently stored in an unguarded warehouse with broken door and a hole in the fence walls - for years despite numerous alarms raised by various people/agencies.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-tv-hezbollah-apparently...

Also interesting that AN seemed to be Nitroprill as seen on the photo in the article (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EeowoGhVoAM2_zs?format=jpg&name=...) - googling shows that it is a bit more stable form of AN.

>i think massive traumatic events also result in a kind of PTSD at the level of population, and unfortunately there is not much we know what to do with it.

I read The Body Keeps The Score and tried EMDR after that. It changed the memory of finding my dad's body after his suicide. It's a much less intense memory now because I remember it differently in a way that doesn't make me feel so abandoned.

Trauma can be healed.

An odd thing that spelling, "Nitroprill," as Orica's commercial prilled AN specifically for coal mining is spelled "Nitropril," with a single "l."

Although Nitropril has stabilizers for resistance to breakdown in storage it has no quieting agents for its actual explosive effect as does most fertilizer-grade AN.

You lost me the moment you referenced TimeOfIsrael for a news about Hezbollah!

you can google it and easily find other sources. In general, if you think about it - Hezbollah is one of the forces controlling the Beirut port, and is known to use AN to produce missiles and explosives.

https://www.revyuh.com/news/politics/corruption-hezbollah-ki...

"After the ship Rhosus was detained in the port of Beirut, “the owner of the ship disappeared with his money, and the alleged buyers in Mozambique showed no movement,” the then captain of the ship Boris Prokoshev told Radio Liberty.

German tabloid Bild believes that this may indicate that the supply of goods to Africa was only a pretext for delivering explosives to the reach of Hezbollah, a Shiite paramilitary group supported by Iran.

An insider told Bild that the refusal to authorize the shipment or sale of the shipment may have been an act of civil disobedience to prevent the shipment from entering Hezbollah."

> Radio Liberty

Sure! Fake news has no limit.

In Texas City 35 years after the disaster it was nothing like the rest of Texas.

They partied like there was no tomorrow, almost like they were in California and were going to be wiped out by an earthquake any minute or something.

The cultural anomaly could be seen to have evolved from a scale of disaster not shared by other nearby industrial communities.

For a person in their 20's Galveston was a fun beach resort, Gilley's was a spectacle in itself, Austin was a great college town, but Texas City was wild.

Thanks for sharing the donation link (I always trust charities recommended by locals). I donated a bit.

Luck plays a huge role in our lives.

In my limited experience with traumatic situations, talking with people, especially people who have dealt with similar experiences, can help to temper the psychological impact. For now, though, just hang in there. Things can get better.

Indeed for luck... Things are already better thanks to our community and supportive friends and family. Thank you.

I always heard the phrase: "I'd rather be lucky than good." growing up and the older I get, the more I realize just how true it is.

Luck has a huge role in how we were created as well. Think of the all the permutations in atoms since the big bang and the probability of you even existing.

And all the mutations in DNA as well to produce a living breathing thinking human being! Indeed we are all incredibly lucky.

   "Life is quite strange
   Life is quite weird,
   Life is really 
   quite odd.
   Life from a star 
   is far more bizarre,
   Than an old bearded bloke 
   they call God.
   So gaze at the sky, 
   and start asking why
   You're even here on this ball.
   For though life is fraught
   The odds are so short
   You're lucky to be here 
   at all"

(Galaxy DNA Song / Eric Idle)

I am always amazed at how people can hold this thought, considering the billions of lucky moments that would have had to go right over the eons, at the same time as one that demands diligence and deliberateness in planning and executing on those things in our lives and the world in order to make meaningful and successful progress every minute of every day

If the alternative is believing that some chap is orchestrating it and actually intended for my car keys to fall down that tiny hole in the deck because it would ultimately be a meaningful success, no thanks.

I may be reading you wrong, but this strikes me as a straw man argument - there's a lot of space between the idea of intelligent design (which may be implied by a statement of how improbable non-intelligent creation of sentient life would be) and a complete abdication of free will (which is how I read your comment). Am I misinterpreting your point?

I interpreted the original point as championing intelligent design, but maybe I’m wrong and I’m missing something?

You seem to be underestimating the vastness of time throughout the entirety of the universe's existence. There's been far more time in the existence of the universe during which these things didn't happen than the time it took them to happen. If this all measurably happened immediately after the universe's inception, sure, intelligent design seems more likely. But that's simply not the case - the opposite of this all happening is it simply not happening, which was already the case at one point and occupied immensely more time and space before now than that of "existence" as you and I know it.

infinity is an interesting thing. Every combination of thing that can be, will be and has been. The probability of not existing is zero.

Not true. 'Possible things' and 'impossible things' are two separate categories, and you can have an infinity of one that doesn't include the other.

For another example of separate infinities, consider the set of integers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5...) and the set of integers-plus-one-half (1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, 5.5...). Both are infinite, but don't contain the other.

EMDR also

Speaking of luck, the Formula 3 crash involving Sophia Floersch is one of the craziest displays of luck I can think of.

All of it documented here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/formula-1/2020/04/23/sophia-floe...

There are a lot of very lucky people after that disaster. Thanks for the link.

I had a similar personal reaction after getting into a high speed car crash (mechanical failure of my car, while traveling at 70 mph on the highway. Entered a spin, slid off the road, did at least one complete roll). 8 years later, I still sometimes think of all the ways the crash could have gone differently that would have resulted in my death.

If I was going a little faster, my car could have ended up in the irrigation ditch and caused me to drown. The 220 lb combat robot in the trunk it could have killed me during the tumble (it tore through its straps and ripped through the back seats into the car). If I had a passenger, the only part of the roof that wasn't crushed in was the driver. A passenger could've easily been killed.

The result was a few superficial injuries (bruises from seatbelt and airbag system). Unscathed otherwise. Woke up thinking the car was on fire (was smoke from airbag) and crawled out. Walked down the street to find my phone (it was in my backpack which flew out a window during the crash) and called for an ambulance.

These are natural human reactions, but the sad truth is that many of the things in our lives come down to luck. You can only do so much to make your environment safer. I, for one, have never transported another one of those combat robots inside my vehicle.

edit - 220 pound combat robot, not 300.

What was that about a 300-pound combat robot?

Short Circuit movie remake ?

Remake? Number 5 is alive!

Got the weight wrong. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.

Wow that is a good reminder to secure my robots when driving... a deer jumped out in front of me recently and I had to hit the brakes hard. Luckily didn’t have my robot in the car. As a fellow Robogames competitor I’m glad you made it out of that crash!

Huh. Fighting robots in car trunks seem to be more common than I realized.

Well my robot is an explorer:

https://reboot.love/t/new-cameras-on-rover/

That's a beast. Nice work!

Thank you!

You should secure everything in your car.

If you crash into something going only 50 kilometres per hour, things that are the same weight as your average smartphone will have enough force on impact to kill you.

In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead.

I've been told on motorcycle hazard awareness courses that if your body hits a solid object at 50 kph, it's 50% mortality risk - it's enough deceleration force to rupture your aorta. Take something like a sign post to the chest and you'll be lucky to survive.

> In a dead stop, maybe, but a car isn't likely to be stopped dead.

I guess it depends on the kind of accident.

In a head-on collision or if you run into a tree/concrete wall, that's pretty close to being stopped dead.

In the more common rear end or "T" collisions, probably not.

If you hit a tree or concrete wall, you still have crumple zones that slow you down over a short period of time.

But the crumple zones don't help the objects (now projectiles) flying about your car. The crumple zones will finishing crumpling around the same time that something sitting on the rear deck of your car will hit you in the back of the head at 50 kph.

The original point was about unsecured objects in the car becoming deadly.

Of course they do. They decrease the rate of deceleration.

Whether it's enough to make a difference, we should make calculations. I'd expect 50kph is where marginal increases in mortality start to become larger, so it wouldn't take much to reduce harm, I believe.

Crumple zones decrease the acceleration of your body, but don't do anything to the acceleration af objects placed on the rear shelf of your car, assuming negligible friction on the rear shelf of your car. Plenty of people get injured in accidents by kleenex boxes placed on that rear deck of their car.

You're travelling at 50 kpm (let's call it 14 m/s). You strike a brick wall. The cell phone on the rear deck of your car flies off the rear deck with minimally deceleration before it leaves the rear deck, travelling 14 m/s through mid-air. Let's make a linearizing approximation and say your body is stopped in 0.8m with constant acceleration. Let's assume the phone started out 1.5m behind your head. By the time your head is stopped by the crumple zone, the phone has travelled 1.6 m, meaning the phone is still 0.7 m behind your head, still travelling 14 m/s (50 kph).

Granted, there are a bunch of simplifying assumptions here (linear deceleration via crumpling, frictionless rear shelf, zero air resistance), but it shows there are plenty of realistic scenarios where something placed on the rear shelf of your car strikes you in the head only minimally slower than the speed at which you were driving.

Not a week ago on a road somewhere in the eastern part of Europe: A dumptruck with in its bin a 100KW genset, secured with a little piece of rope. Needless to say I gave it a very wide berth and hung well behind. An accident with that rig would have serious consequences even with the load secured, without that it is too dangerous to be in traffic, let alone on a two lane highway.

Lots of good memories from Robogames. I had first read about it in Servo magazine when I lived on the east coast as a kid. My family ended up moving to California when I was in high school and I was a regular attendee from that point on. I entered robomagellan regularly during college (except the one year the university's club entered the heavyweight combat robot competition). After college I ended up moving to Orange County and didn't attend much.

Sad to see that it ended.

Well for some throwback memories I have some old TechTV coverage of Robogames 2005 of my YouTube channel. I’m the kid with bleached blonde hair in the video.

https://youtu.be/J2R-TlBomnQ

TechTV was amazing.

> The 300 lb combat robot in the trunk

Please explain?

I didn't quite remember the weight properly. It was a 220 pound robot for the heavyweight class in Robogames. I was driving between my university campus and the campus extension in the next town when the crash happened.

I think it was the exact weight of the combat robot that elicited the curiosity :)

It was a university robotics club project, I had mainly remembered it was the highest weight class.

I mostly worked on the electronics (my personal main gig was robomagellan), the others were more interested in the welding. I got it crossed with he superheavies from BattleBots.

sounds like a scout or a sapper?

This was a great reminder to secure objects and keep them in the trunk/boot whenever possible.

Yep. I did not use straps of the proper strength and it ripped through the back seats (it was in my trunk). I had a '06 Saturn Ion and the rear seats could be folded down to make more space in the trunk. They were in their normal position, but the force of them being hit my the robot must've broken the latches.

Unfortunately with the immense popularity of SUVs in the US, a lot of people no longer have trunks/boots that are isolated from the rest of the cabin.

I was in a 40-mph crash last year with a large old CRT in my SUV. It shot forward from the back and crashed into the dashboard but if the car had rolled, like yours did...who knows

> mechanical failure of my car

That's scary. What was the failure if you don't mind me asking?

Front passenger control arm. Basically the suspension collapsed and planted that corner of the car into the road.

Had the same happen to me when I was younger and drove a BMW 525i. It happened in a corner where the car basically just spun and did a 360. I managed to limp home as the car was sort of drivable still.

what part failed on the car?

Control arm on the front passenger wheel. That corner planted into the road and threw the car into a spin.

Was it the control arm or the control arm ball-joint? Did you have any warning, i.e. was your suspension really loose?

This is something you should have noticed under normal circumstances.

Not him but maybe as a uni student he was driving a crappy car that had problems before, more bad things happen to people without reliable hardware.

I am not indicating fault. I drove a $1500 car for 4-5 years.

Just wondering if the issue could have been prevented. Loose balljoints are notoriously hard to diagnose, since they are supposed to have movement and it's hard to distinguish "play" and "movement".

A ball joint popping out of the steering knuckle is probably one of the most critical failures your car can have. Hard to think of anything worse.

Even if your brakes all locked up at the same time, it would probably be safer, since there is less chance to immediately flip the car.

It was used and deemed to be from damage the car had taken in an accident prior to us buying it. We knew it was involved in an accident previously, but it was supposed to have been professionally repaired (we got it from a Ford dealership iirc).

As far as anyone could tell post crash, the control arm had broken through, rather than coming loose.

That's terrifying. Was this a Certified used vehicle or just a random on the lot?

I honestly don't remember at this point.

Most factory CPO programs exclude accident vehicles (beyond simple bumper cover resprays from incompetent parallel parkers).

That's what I thought, guessing this wasn't certified. I put a lot of trust in certification programs. Also I should mention as a counterpoint to a "wrecked car" I have a "wreck" on my 2019 that didn't do anything but scratch my bumper while totaling the other car (8mph impact but steel bumpers) and has plummeted my trade in $8k.. sucks. I didn't even claim any insurance work or anything on it.

I wonder if I can somehow get that removed if I take it to get checked out at a frame shop, it's a brand new Jeep and this going to follow it everywhere. I don't recall ever hearing about people removing wrecks, though. Not trying to title-wash but prove that it's fine for the next buyer.

You got super lucky. That's the kind of failure that can kill you easily by throwing you into oncoming traffic.

It's always a good idea to thoroughly examine every detail of a used car before trusting it at high speeds on a highway. Sounds like it might have been quite difficult to detect this particular problem though if it was a barely visible hairline crack that just got worse over time. scary.

You actually did die, we've been waiting to tell you. This is your third reality, you died back in 2003 also.

It's interesting how different people react to things like this. I went off the road and my car rolled and smashed into a concrete barrier upside down, squishing every part but where I was sitting. I wasn't afraid at any time, immediately before, during, or after. The concussion was rough and I had a lot of suicidal ideation going on in the next few days, though, for no real reason³. I genuinely cannot believe the person I was in the next few weeks. Some sort of total sap.

But I don't really think about it anymore and I don't carry it with me as anything more than a memory of an incident. Objectively, minor changes to circumstances could have led to my death, but contemplating that brings me no fear or anger.

This reminds me of the fact that most soldiers going through combat don't actually get PTSD¹. Even among those seeing horrific things it's not that high².

It's not a tough vs weak thing, imho, just an accident of how we are. I didn't do very much to be 184 cm. I didn't do very much to have functioning lungs. I didn't do very much to walk away from a car crash and be suicidal for two weeks and then have no adverse effects after.

¹ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891773/

² https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/why-some-...

³ My life was fine, no one else was hurt, and I had a slightly strained calf. The desire for suicide was not driven by reason.

This is the kind of comment I enjoy on here. Thank you for sharing your human experience. I am not sure when the idea of nature/nurture will be put to rest, I have accepted it but it also has very strange philosophical ideas, like the idea of how laws are made making assumptions about humans, but what if the humans are not knowledgeable or understand what they are doing, or have different values? We already have laws for disabled or other classes of humans, and also temporarily insane. This brings up very interesting points on how equality is not equal, how laws are complex for the purpose of gaming them by those of higher intelligence or memory of obscure facts.

Genetics has a lot to do with who we are, our race/looks, height, thoughts/intelligence even. Yet many cling to the idea that nurture can overcome nature. Our mtDNA and Y chromosome is the hardware our consciousness runs on. Just the way we are, not a strong or a weak thing you say, there are mutations in us, some are beneficial, some are good/bad, but I disagree, of course some are weak or objectively bad. Hotwheels from 8chan made a good post about how he doesn't like his existence and would support euthanasia for people like himself. I doubt anyone would want to be born with tay-sachs, and when you say not strong/weak you may be using a surviorship bias to say it, although most humans are on average quite healthy.

I was originally going to post how I had the opposite reaction to an event like this like you, a car crash when I lost control in the rain, thinking I was about to die. I didn't and I was mostly fine aside from some back pain from whiplash. I have aphatasia, do you happen to have it? I have a bad memory so I don't think people with it can get PTSD, so it is an adaptive mechanism, although I lose a lot of richness in thought I suppose I have been through really bad things with no problems, had a gun pointed at me, demanded my stuff, and I said no, he was confused and didn't really know what to do, I left. I didn't really think much of it but others thought it was crazy. No PTSD either.

Interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading your story. Sorry about your memory and aphantasia.

> I have aphantasia, do you happen to have it?

Nope, I'm completely fine. The only thing is that for months afterwards I couldn't head the ball in my weekly soccer game, so I had to give it up. I still kick it around with my friends, but I can't compete in rec because a centre-back has to head the ball, so I don't. I was comparatively advantaged in the air, so that sucks, but c'est la vie, right?

To be clear, aphantasia is not a symptom. People are "perfectly fine" that have it. We just don't see things without our eyes open. If that makes sense. And, I believe, most of us have been this way our whole lives.

Do you dream?

I first learnt about aphantasia maybe a couple of years ago in some corners of the net.. I can’t really imagine how it’s possible that you don’t see stuff with your mind.. To me it seems just as strange as being unable to speak while having a perfectly fine voice..

I probably have the opposite problem, when I read a book that I like I’m completely lost in that world and I’m kind of unaware of what is happening in the real world.

I remember when I had an EEG ages ago and the technician asked me to relax, and I did exactly that. He must have noticed something strange since he asked me if I was sleeping..

I remember dreams. I don't remember seeing things in them, per se. Just like I remember yesterday, but couldn't visualize anything.

Easiest way to relate it is I will recognize people well. But if you asked me cold to tell you what someone's hair color was, I'm unlikely to be able to. (Now, if someone is notable for having a color hair, I can remember that as a fact. But I have to specifically remember it as one.)

How can you remember something you forgot could be rephrased as how can you forget something if you remembered! My experience is the same, the dreams are like a story a kaleidoscope of things that happened and ideas rather than visual memories

Ah, okay. No judgment of your wellness intended.

No worries, just making sure you don't dismiss it as "something wrong with you." Entirely plausible you could be this way and just not realize it is notable.

Are you interested in changing it? I don't know if there is a PM option here, but I had good success with using tACS for other reasons and it had the side effect of restoring my mental vision for a few things. I haven't used it in a while so it's possible that it is temporary.

I'm not entirely sure, all told. I don't see it as much of a handicap for me, just a bit of how I remember things. That said, I'm almost always willing to try things.

Any reason not to just have the conversation in the open?

I too enjoyed Teknoman117's and renewiltord's contrasting slice-of-life anecdotes about near-death experiences. It's neat to get this kind of insight into human nature.

But I really don't understand the need to make up a bunch of strange commentary (nature/nurture, temporary insanity, equality not equal, genetics, euthanasia, etc.) that either doesn't really have a point, or beats around the bush so much with vague language it's not even possible to tell what the point is. I suppose English isn't your first language, and that's fine, but I'm sure you realize even talking about genetics is a mine-field.

I also specifically want to consider your casually-mentioned phrase: "laws are complex for the purpose of gaming them". To my thinking mind, this is a throw-away accusation that really has no standing in actual fact. Yes, laws can be complex. Yes, regulatory capture exists. Yes, people game "the system" all the time. But all three together implies some highly unlikely turn of events, given that it is contradictory (why would a self-serving law be so complex that it can only be taken advantage of with added difficulty). Even if this unlikely convergence has happened, it cannot be a pattern because it is rare--and the unspoken conclusion would be "conspiracy." Your first 2 paragraphs contain a lot of illogical and unfounded assertions like this, with vague conclusions that are outside of normal discourse, and I find it hard to take any of it seriously.

"laws are complex for the purpose of gaming them"

Would saying simpler laws that everyone can understand and obey be better? That was the thing I agreed with but my friend, doing tax tricks and making more money when unemployed, as well as lawyers who get people off serious crimes are adept at finding loopholes because law is confusing.

If you aren't smart you aren't going to get good legal advice you have to understand the implications. It is clear that is what happens in courts to many people. If there is a simple Wikipedia for people to use, why is there no simple laws for those who aren't lawyers to understand?

So... people without Y chromosome are only half-conscious?

> This reminds me of the fact that most soldiers going through combat don't actually get PTSD¹.

The meme that people exposed to stressful events (traumatic events) get sick needs to die. It is perpetuated by psychologists but has no rooting in facts. Humans are built to be resilient, only a single-digit percentage of people exposed to traumatic events develop PTSD. Your experience is, luckily, the norm.

https://twitter.com/degenrolf/status/1191619250647183366?s=2...

Single digits is pretty bad, when you deal with thousands and more. Which applies both to combat and to accidents.

Order-of-magnitude comparison, gay people are also low single digit.

But yes, I agree a bit more scope sensitivity is in order.

Morbid thought: Google Street View right now almost certainly has a 360 panorama of the location of your death. An intersection, a highway, a hospital, somewhere. That panorama will someday be filled with sadness for your loved ones. But you don't get to know its coordinates just yet.

Statistically, it's usually a hospital, nursing home, or your own home. So you may already know the three most likely coordinates, if you're old enough that you aren't moving again.

That’s why I avoid hospitals. Guy is perfectly alive, taken to a hospital and pronounced dead.

That doesn't apply to ML-370 unfortunately

2005's Lord of War, staring Nick Cage and Jared Leto, has a great quote similar to this. I'll bungle it, because I can't find the exact line but it goes like:

"Yuri, every single person has a bullet waiting for them; trying to find them. The trick to life, Yuri? Before that bullet finds you, find a way to die."

The opening sequence to that film is also superb film-making. A set-up, a mid point, and a twist ending, all in three minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUEiKs2UAo&feature=emb_titl...

Such an underrated film. And before the decline of Cage.

Nick is Schrödinger's actor. He is both terrible and fantastic all at once. His roles are either garbage or masterclass, there seems to be no middle ground.

Yes, it's confounding that movies like "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Raising Arizona" coexist with a ton of hot garbage he's been involved with.

No judgement for him, a guy has to make a living. I imagine he finds the situation amusing. His 2013 movie "Joe" is really good if you need something new to watch: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2382396/

Tip: Announcing a twist ending ruins it.

2005

We're living in the 2020 time warp. Entertainment-wise, everything from the beginning of film has been simultaneously smeared and crushed into this one year.

It's a twist ending to the first five minutes of the film.

Still. I watched the 5-minute clip just expecting "the twist". Then when it happened, it had less impact because I was anticipating something different or "twistier". Had OP not announced the twist, that last shot might have actually surprised me.

On the flipside, my father passed away this time last year and his favourite pub the month after. We looked it up on Google Streetview recently and there he was, immortalised stood out front of the pub with a pint in hand.

When I was in high school, I was at school camping event and we were playing tag in the woods. I ran down a slope and tripped, and fell chest first onto a log, right on my sternum. I was uninjured, but since then I've always thought, "what if there were a broken tree branch right there, it would have punctured my heart and I would have died very quickly." I'm almost 50 now, so we're talking over 30 years I've been thinking about that tree log and the branch stub that could have killed me.

You mean that you had a "combat robot" in the trunk? What exactly is a combat robot? Custom-built by you?

Sorry for the traumatic experience.

In case you can get in touch with the operators of the website, it could be helpful to let them know that it's common in Germany (and likely elsewhere) for people to avoid entering their credit card information on most websites due to security/privacy concerns. Being able to pay through trusted intermediaries (like PayPal) would make it more likely for people to make a donation.

Unfortunately PayPal is not supported in Lebanon. We are trying to setup a GoFundMe campaign (also not supported) through an international intermediary.

Paypal trusted? I can't think of anything less trusted around here.

It is mostly trusted. It is not perfect but most people have not been screwed by it, it it a zero sum game so sometimes they side with one more, usually the buyer. There are more buyers than sellers.

This recurrent memory that you can’t stop replaying is a symptom of PTSD. Of course your work and communal recovery cannot stop, but consider getting therapeutic treatment for yourself to help mitigate the impact of this event.

Was your hearing damaged at all from the blast?

No, not at all... I didn't notice any hearing loss. I would still have to get properly examined and maybe get an audiogram.

An interesting “mundane” fact about this explosion is that it destroyed so many windows that there probably isn’t enough replacement glass in the country to fix all the windows. And with the port destroyed they don’t know how they’re going to receive more glass. Not to mention aluminum and other materials.

> they don’t know how they’re going to receive more glass

Who is "they"?

The port is partially operational [1], Tripoli hasn't closed, and there is unofficial trade with Syria.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/beirut-port-resumes-p...

It was whoever KPFA was interviewing about the situation recently. Someone in the area at least. Can’t remember who, sorry.

I think Syria is also out of glass...

The St Georges hospital is doing God's work as are you. A wonderful institution that's stood there for 100+ years and will keep standing for 100+ more. Thank you for sharing your story and the links.

Yeah, I narrowly escaped a burning building. Freaky stuff.

How's your hearing? If you have any tinnitus, get yourself some corticosteroids ASAP. You could still potentially prevent some hearing damage.

I think it's fine, I didn't notice any hearing loss... Will get an audiogram to make sure.

I’ve had a few traumatic experiences in my past and it hurt me big time to not open up and talk about my feelings. I became withdrawn for years and only recently started opening back up.

If you ever feel like you need to vent to a complete stranger absolutely free of judgement, I’m here for you. Shoot me a Private message. I’m lebanese by the way, living in the US.

"there’s not a single minute I don’t think of what happened and emulate different scenarios where I could’ve died"

It might be helpful to hear that this is apparently a very common psychological reaction to surviving a disaster. Speaking as a survivor of a disaster, this is a reaction that I myself had. It does get better over time.

Also common, for those who lose loved ones or are injured themselves, is imagining different scenarios for emerging unscathed

Lebanese here

Focusing on the direct cause of the blast is a huge distraction from understanding why the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate were stored in the middle of Beirut for 7 years.

The president Aoun and his senior leadership were all aware of this problem but said they didn't have the authority to do anything about it. IMO, this is a hilariously bad argument that's deflecting who the most likely owner is. Aoun and his lackeys apparently have the authority to start a state of emergency and shoot protesters but don't have any such authority to prevent half of Beirut from being nuked.

The director of the Beirut port Badri Daher has been running bazaar ever since he's been in that position, regularly stealing supplies from shipments, suing reporters for defamation and beating up investigative journalists. The port director also reports to the Amal party which is closely allied to Aouns.

2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in the same building, next to a cache of fireworks, mind you. Corruption plays a part, but I'm astonished by the incompetence that's usually going hand in hand with the corruption. I'm surprised a catastrophe took 7 years to happen. You simply do not store that much fertilizer in a single place.

And Brazil (Brazilian here) sent a diplomatic mission to help. It's lead by our very own Badri Daher, the previous vice president who threw a coup against the previous president.

Incompetence and corruption are often hand-in-hand. Corrupt governance often results in the appointment of (or support of in a corrupt-but-more-capitalist environment) sycophants who don't know anything about the thing they're in charge of. This leads to a degradation in the culture within whatever organization they're leading.

At first it's small, experienced engineers or safety officers and the like will start leaving. But there's enough left. But then the money for maintenance and training diminishes over time, likely to someone's private bank account. After even just a few short years of this you'll have an incompetent organization.

I've seen this play out, not just in governments, but in private enterprises as well. When you see a division's quality dropping, look to the top and see what they're doing and emphasizing and how they got that position.

What you said feels so "obvious" but really it's profound.

Corruption and Incompetence DO go hand in hand! And where there is one, you're likely to find the other. Damn it would make an awesome area of study for a sociologist!

In my career in both big companies and startups, I feel like I've been exposed to so many mysteriously incompetent departments and executives, only to find later that there was an explanation that I consider corruption.

Of course, thats not to say it's illegal. It's usually perfectly legal behavior that optimizes for personal gain rather than the outcome you'd expect from the person or department's title.

And that brings us to a point that has been bothering me for a while- When we look at those global 'corruption index' infographics and stuff, they must be measuring the _Illegal Corruption_ in a country, right? Like when a bureaucrat demands a bribe.

How could anything measure Legal Corruption? Like when an executive hires friends who are less competent than whatever the 'regular' hiring process would produce? Or when lobbyists get legislators to pass regulations that materially favor their business, stuff like that.

You piqued my curiosity with your comment, I'm trying to find what research is out there. I've found some articles behind paywalls (I may dig further later to find non-paywalled versions, I'm not dropping $44 for a paper, especially one on the periphery of my interests) in public policy research about these issues, which makes sense.

Not research, but where it was driven home for me was Venezuela and their oil and energy sector. A major economic concern (before the drop in oil prices) was the drop in oil production rates, which was due, largely, to a reduction in proper maintenance after Chavez (still alive at the time I was reading about this particular issue) had nationalized companies and appointed non-experts into leadership positions.

But it's not just them, that was just a particularly well publicized case. While many people probably believe (rightly) that the US federal government is corrupted and incompetent, a lot more corruption (and incompetence) lies at the local and state levels. Probably due to the reduced scrutiny they suffer.

Sci-hub usually helps you get around paywalled research articles. Otherwise, maybe just drop the links you found here for posterity's sake?

> Corruption and Incompetence DO go hand in hand!

Yes! There is a simpler reason to in addition to what the parent comment says. Corruption requires removing accountability. When you remove it for moral reasons, you often lose accountability for all reasons in the process. If the act is done in the dark, not only can no one see if you're doing the right job (morally), they also can't see if you're doing job right (effectively).

> How could anything measure Legal Corruption?

One metric I know that I think hints at this is "time to open a business": https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IC.REG.DURS?most_recent...

That's a good proxy for how much corruption—legal or not—you have to navigate to get something done.

Where do all the competent people end up? Do the competent people find equally challenging positions or is their potential wasted?

Wasted.

Competent people are worth a salary, they typically end up working somewhere else or go abroad completely.

If they stay, most likely wasted. Or they succeed despite the organization, but ultimately fight an uphill battle the entire time. It's usually best to just leave, but that also creates a vacuum that will be filled with an incompetent (or subpar) yes-man further exacerbating the problem.

That can create conflict for civil service employees. To stay where you're not that useful and feel it's a waste, but you're doing some good by shouting into the storm and trying to hold back the stupidity. Or to leave and let an incompetent person take over behind you (or competent but overworked because they don't fill the position). If you stay in that situation it's out of a sense of duty, but it's incredibly exhausting.

In case where corruption and nepotism are wide spread in a society, only thing competent people can do is leave the society or country.

In my opinion, nepotism is bigger problem than corruption in the middle east. A lot of these corrupt deals happen through family connections. And then you go to private industry, and you will find that all the higher up people are usually related to each other.

So most of the ambitious people leave for the west causing further damage to society with brain drain.

Competence is as much state as fitness is, i.e. people loose it if their job does not allow them to be competent and they are unable to switch.

I have seen really competent people become incompetent overtime in soul crushing paper pushing jobs. You work long enough in a such job, you become the exact kind of person you despised when you started.

It is especially acute in governmental jobs which have lesser scope for role changes etc.

> you become the exact kind of person you despised when you started

I don't think so, no, but affected to some extent, yes.

Sometimes they end up in the private sector, where small enough firms can avoid the corruption that gets into larger bureaucracies. Often they end up leaving the field or the country - there are lots of great Lebanese engineers outside of Lebanon.

In the private sector and abroad. Corruption correlates pretty well with rates of emigration.

... then they lay off the Servo team.

Perhaps an interesting datapoint from a Western government, a similar disaster happened in The Netherlands in the year 2000. 177 tones of firework were stored in a single building in the middle of a residential area.

The results were pretty much what you’d expect.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster

> Prior to the disaster it had a good safety record and met all safety audits.

At least one thing that differs from Beirut

Though...

> When it was built in 1977, the warehouse was outside the town, but as new residential areas were built it became surrounded by low-income housing

and

> However, the illegal use of shipping containers reduced safety

Netherlands starting to sound like Lebanon

There's a whole magazine about things like this.

In previous decades they had feature articles and a few pages of fine print with a couple sentences about each reported incident large or small. Fortunately most were not fatalities but were kind of grim like obituaries anyway.

_Man checks oil tank with lighter and lives._

Now it looks like their website is mainly an incident log:

https://www.industrialfireworld.com/567881/hydrotreater-fire...

This linked event was last week when I was actually driving through the massive tank farm of this old refinery which extends to both sides of a state highway which has always cut through.

I wondered what that smoke was.

You might like these videos by the US Chemical Safety Board: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB

Just to quantify how large the explosion in Beirut was: the TNT equivalence was about 200 times as high as the explosion in Enschede. Crazy!

A lot of western explosions of ammonium nitrate start with "they decided to use explosives to dislodge when it froze/caked in a tank"...

That sounds insane. So probably true I guess? Still, sources would be nice!

100 years ago it was "common" according to WP [1]; I can't speak to whether it's still handled so cavalierly:

"The workers needed to use pickaxes to get it out, a problematic situation because they could not enter the silo and risk being buried in collapsing fertilizer. To ease their work, small charges of dynamite were used to loosen the mixture.

This seemingly suicidal procedure was in fact common practice. It was well known that ammonium nitrate was explosive, having been used extensively for this purpose during World War I, but tests conducted in 1919 had suggested that mixtures of ammonium sulfate and nitrate containing less than 60% nitrate would not explode. On these grounds, the material handled by the plant, nominally a 50/50 mixture, was considered stable enough to be stored in 50,000-tonne lots, more than ten times the amount involved in the disaster. Indeed, nothing extraordinary had happened during an estimated 20,000 firings, until the fateful explosion on September 21.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oppau_explosion

That must have been an absolutely incredible blast. To derail a tram 15 kilometers away... those things weigh anywhere from 50 to 100 tons.

A lot of surface area to catch the shockwave though. It's the same reason that semi-trucks are more likely to be blown over by high winds even than cars despite weighing much more.

Now if something like a tank were blown over, then I'd be impressed.

That's a good point, if the tram was broadside to the explosion that might have just done the trick. Even so a tram is pretty compact and solid compared to a truck, semis have low density when empty, the tractor/trailer combination is more like huge sail attached to a relatively light frame. When they're loaded it's a different matter. There was a movie a while ago of trailers like that being tossed around by a tornado but they were all empty.

The tram was 30 kilometres away!

Oh, you're right, that was the distance to the previous city. 30 kilometers it is. Even more incredible. I've seen a 30 ton truck hit by a tram (Overtoom/van Baerle crossing for the locals). The tram didn't even have a dent in it, the truck needed to be lifted out in bits and pieces.

Indeed. It's in the top-ten listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ammonium_nitrate_disas... , being close to as large as Beirut 2020. Note also e.g. Texas City 1947

Though I see different estimates of the size of Oppau 1921; the material that exploded was under 500T of fertilizer (17% of Beirut), which means it should be under 250kT of TNT equivalent (I've seen AN assessed at 42% as explosive as TNT by mass). But based on crater size, it looks like estimates are more like 1-2 kT, similar to Beirut. Also, windows blown out "more than 25km away" is pretty similar in blast radius to Beirut (I've seen "15 miles" quoted, IIRC), suggesting a similar magnitude.

It's actually remarkable, comparing against other blasts of similar quantities of material or less, how few fatalities there were in Beirut, especially given that it was inside the city. Brest 1947 is larger with less fatalities, but they had towed it out to sea three hours before it finally exploded.

Though I think that, when it comes to non-nuclear explosions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion is still the title-holder. What a privilege.

The shape of the package prior to explosion is going to be a pretty big factor in how long the explosion took to consume all the material. A slight change in shape or density can have a large effect on what the shockwave will look like, and can make it asymmetrical.

Take a roll of fast burning cord and set it on fire when rolled out: a slight fizzing and some minor damage to plants. Wrap 10 turns of it around a tree, set it on fire and you'll have a cut cleaner than the sharpest axe cutting your tree clean in half.

The Halifax one is just terrible. I went to the memorial site when visiting the city just before it was removed. Incredible but true: the city lost the memorial sculpture.

> Corruption plays a part, but I'm astonished by the incompetence that's usually going hand in hand

One of the main reasons corruption is highly undesirable is because it allows the sequelae of incompetence to fester until they blow. In this case, quite literally.

At least in English corruption means a lot more than just bribes. https://www.wordnik.com/words/corruption

When an organization, government, society is corrupt it is rotten, polluted, depraved. Lots of things are wrong that have nothing to do with bad money exchanging hands.

>You simply do not store that much fertilizer in a single place

Perhaps it is done, and in a port near you.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/lebanon-blast-alarms-nsw-res...

>Kooragang Island is already home to a storage facility operated by chemical giant Orica, where up to 12,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate are stored and around 430,000 tonnes produced each year

IIRC Orica is the same company that made that stuff that was stored on docks of Beirut.

> In 2014, Incitec Pivot won approval for a storage facility on Kooragang Island, three kilometres from the centre of Newcastle. It has not yet built the facility, which would have the capacity for 30,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.

In the name of all that's holy: what the FUCK? Who even thinks of such a thing? And who dares to approve it?

> IIRC Orica is the same company that made that stuff that was stored on docks of Beirut.

To be fair the company is not responsible for the (iirc) Russian ship owner simply disavow and dump ship, sailors and cargo, or for the incompetence of the Lebanese government.

Newcastle is one of the main shipping ports in Australia.

Perhaps the biggest? An island 3k from habitation sounds like a good place to put it.

In Beirut a tenth of that amount shattered windows a kilometer away. I know blast energy is not linear but still, there is no good in keeping such numbers of an accident prone explosive in any place anywhere.

In Beirut it was kept in a ordinary warehouse, with fireworks.

The risk in a purpose built facility is vastly lower.

The cargo ship whose cargo was sized and that was eventually impounded was registered in Moldavia, if what I have read is correct.

Trivia - Orica's history includes Nobel's (the Alfred Nobel) company.

And ICI - Imperial Chemical Industries

Actually, that fertilizer is not an Orica product. It is a knock-off with a slightly misspelled but similar name. That said, if it was the result would have been the same. The problem was not the product. If you follow safe handling and storage guidelines ammonium nitrate should be safe. Obviously storing it with fireworks and welding next to that combo is probably not in the Orica safety data sheet.

I got a buddy who was an explosives expert from the Marines. He tells me that it is safe to store a bunch of explosives in one spot, but only if you carefully measure the distance and distribute them appropriately.

The general idea is that if a warehouse containing 2500+ tons of explosives catches on fire... then you have 5000x explosions, each 1000lbs.

That's pretty bad of course, but not nearly as bad as all 5,000,000 lbs exploding at the same time.

-------

So the error was primarily in the way they stored the explosives. They didn't have any explosive expert run the calculations or think of safety issues.

The military has to store tons of explosives all together. Be it in ships, bombs, C4, or other truly frightening explosives (and ammonia nitrate isn't a military grade explosive: the stuff the military uses is much, much more dangerous). Keeping that safe even in the presence of fires and errors is possible, but only with the proper training and procedures.

I've heard that military ordnance (c4 etc) is actually much safer (read: harder to set off accidentally) than non-military grade explosives such as anfo/fireworks too.

C4 for example can be microwaved/heated to very high temperatures and won't explode without a dedicated blasting cap.

Indeed in general you’ll have better luck detonating C4 by hitting it with a hammer hard enough than with heat.

There are two main types of common explosives those which can be detonated using fire (e.g. gunpowder) and those which are shock detonated (e.g. cemtex).

The blasting cap is just that an explosive that generates the sock needed to trigger the primary explosive, the blasting cap can usually be triggered with heat with an electric or flammable fuse.

Most military explosives don’t explode when set on fire most of them don’t even burn well or at all, they are nearly all exclusively shock detonated so the distance works it basically ensures that the shock from a single explosion can’t trigger a chain reaction.

I’m not sure if this would be the same with temperature sensitive explosives since once they reach their flash point things go boom.

There have been some pretty close calls. The link below is to a near miss with a nuclear bomb which had 3 of its 4 fail safe mechanisms fail. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_Goldsboro_B-52_crash

At any rate, you don't store this kind of material in the middle of a big population center

Or near critical infrastructure

> You simply do not store that much fertilizer in a single place.

If it doesn't make sense, it's not true.

This doesn't make sense.

Ideas which don't pass your subjective filter of what sounds correct must be false? Citation for this definition of how truth works, please.

> I'm astonished by the incompetence that's usually going hand in hand with the corruption

I think it follows naturally.

If you replace objective standards of quality with favoritism, bribery, theft, and fraud, then of course you'll attract incompetents like moths to a flame.

The insanest thing is that it’s emerging that despite ammonium nitrate is predominantly used as a fertilizer, in this case it had been purchased and was being shipped for use as a mining explosive. If true, this is relevant because it there’s be no retardant chemicals added to the mix.

Interesting link (disregard the conspiracy-theory-sounding title, it’s actually a very balanced account): https://youtu.be/91uwQAYO1P8 This is where I first heard of the welders, so now my faith in the rest of the account has risen (irrationally, I suppose).

This was my first thought exactly. A welder's sparks is how it happened, but not why it happened.

Why was 2700 lbs of ammonium nitrate stored there? Why for so long? Why was that ship offered to dock their originally? Why was the door broken requiring welding? Why were fireworks stored right near ammonium nitrate? Why were fireworks stored there at all regardless of the ammonium nitrate? Why didn't the longshoreman unload it from the ship?

There are some answers for this: https://www.axios.com/beirut-ammonium-nitrate-explained-61a0...

Short Summary:

- Russian ship with engine trouble made emergency stop years ago.

- Ship was carrying all of that ammonium nitrate with bad papers (probably illegal transport).

- Ship wasn't allowed to leave (since they're probably moving explosive material illegally).

- Eventually crew was let go and Beirut stored the ammonium nitrate in the warehouse at the dock.

- People at the dock begged for it to be moved saying that it would 'blow up all of Beirut'.

- Government probably didn't know what to do with it.

>Government probably didn't know what to do with it.

Move it to somewhere remote? Anywhere but in Beirut would have been better.

This is government, you can't just "move it somewhere". You have to have a budget, get permitting, put out an rfq for the moving and storing of explosive materials, deal with lawsuits around the contact and the nimbys who don't want explosives stored near them. Years doesn't surprise me at all, and that's if someone was actually motivated.

So this means you can blow up another country by just sending a ship full of explosives to their dock with invalid papers... perfection.

Oh please nobody tell (just going alphabetically) America, China, or Russia this. Deniability is far too plausible.

> This is government

It actually isn’t. This sort of thing isn’t particularly common and people are usually prevented from setting these situations up by following (however grudgingly) the rules.

This happened where the government was dysfunctional, corrupt, bankrupt and the country was under huge strain.

How many governments do you think have a ready-made safe and secured spot in waiting to store thousands of tons of explosives? Some very wealthy nations might, but I suspect very few could have handled this much better.

And yet explosions this large are rare. Taking the material off the owner is a last resort. Regulation can prevent the problem long before it gets to the stage it got to in Lebanon.

Assuming I’m wrong, why are there not more explosions?

This stuff sat there without exploding for seven years, and was only set off because of two unfortunate coincidences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster happened in a western country with a reputable company that followed the regulations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery is still sitting in prime position to destroy London's financial district one day, with no-one taking responsibility for clearing it up.

In the first example of exploding fireworks, the company was not following regulations, as noted in your link. The fireworks were stored illegally and people went to prison as a result of their behaviour.

The second is bad, but isn’t the same the same as it’s there by accident and the remedy is far from clear. Depending on who you believe, the munitions are either safe now, or can’t be touched. Quite how that gets managed I don’t know.

The link also says this about the last time they tried to manage a sunken munitions ship:

“One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967, to neutralize the contents of SS Kielce, a ship of Polish origin, sunk in 1946, off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work, Kielce exploded with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing "panic and chaos" to Folkestone, although there were no injuries.[5] Kielce was at least 3 or 4 miles (4.8 or 6.4 km) from land, sunk in deeper water than Richard Montgomery, and had "just a fraction" of the load of explosives”

Isn't it what military is for? Surely every military on the planet has protocols and infrastructure around ordnance disposal. As well as logistics capability to pick it up and transport to the disposal/storage site.

At least they could've dispersed it in multiple smaller storage areas, rather than accumulating it all together.

They could literally Kiat scatter it on the land. It’s a fertiliser

I agree with your assessment of why moving the explosives was so difficult, but I would quibble with the use of "nimby" in this context. I think most anyone has a legitimate concern for not wanting that in their vicinity.

That's where the incompetence comes in. When the crew was allowed to leave and the explosives were brought onshore, the judge ordered the government to either sell it off or move it to a more permanent storage facility; the government just never got around to it.

If they seized it, couldn’t they just have sold it to get rid of it?

looking back yes. But IIRC, bankruptcy was declared and this was someone's property. Obviously pretty stupid but everyone must have hoped it will solve itself. They could have sold it and held the money in an account, it's not like they were the crown jewels of the British Royal family. $12 Billion negligence, plus the dead and wounded.

The captain of the ship had some interesting things to say about the whole debacle.

- The ship had to dock in Beirut because they found out they were short of the passage fee for the Suez Canal.

- They were going to raise more money to get through the canal by taking on a job transporting machinery from Beirut along with the explosives

- The ship would have been overburdened by the machinery and the explosives, so they couldn't pass an inspection and couldn't leave.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082

> Government probably didn't know what to do with it

Wikipedia: "[ammonium nitrate] is predominantly used in agriculture as a high-nitrogen fertilizer".

Doh?

> Why were fireworks stored right near ammonium nitrate?

Just a guess, but for filing purposes?

You can imagine thought processes along the lines of deciding to store it in warehouse X because all the dangerous explosive stuff goes there.

You can also imagine that it would be convenient to have all the dangerous stuff in one place where it could be monitored easily and have extra security.

It would be superficially logical.

Even if that's the case, it is rendered irrelevant by the fact that many people knew about the dangerous situation for years and it was heavily discussed over many official communiques. It's not like every time one of those conversations happened, they were resolved with "Oh, it's OK because the flammable stuff all gets filed together."

If we want to learn from this tragedy, what we really need to understand is, when the dangerous situation was so well known, why was nothing done?

The answer appears to be a combination of unclear spheres of accountability and lack of incentives.

We accept that sometimes, commercial actors will behave in wildly antisocial ways — such as the shipping company who owned the rotting, explosive-laden MV Rhosus abandoning it in Beirut harbor. We rely on government to protect us from such dangers — but sometimes it doesn't. Why?

> 2700 lbs

*6,062,712 lbs (2750 tons)

Yeah, I hope this is a wake-up call to every large city around the world to audit their storage of explosives within the city.

And yes, authoritarian regimes have the least excuse, because they constantly demonstrate how they're willing to wield their power against protestors and dissidents.

Astonishingly there is a proposal to store many times more ammonium nitrate next to a population center in Australia and it looks to be going ahead.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/lebanon-blast-alarms-nsw-res...

Not just a proposal, they already store up to 12000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate on kooragang island at any one time

It was from an abandoned ship that sunk. The owner should be blamed first. I wonder if Lebanon will try to punish them or just focus on pointing fingers internally.

> It was from an abandoned ship that sunk.

If only. It was unloaded first.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-do...

And all this time one could have just used it as a free fertiliser subsidy to some farmers ...

If the results weren't so horrifically tragic this would seem like a set up for a Simpson's gag:

1. Store 2750 tons of an explosive in the port of a major city.

2. Store it next to some fireworks???!!!

3. Do a welding job on the building.

This is stunning incompetence.

Don't forget that it was a shipment en route to Mozambique. The ship had to dock in Beirut to fix some technical problem and Lebanese officials decided to confiscate it.

So the crew left, the company wrote the ship off and the dangerous cargo was left in a hangar until it exploded.

I have a question that only a Lebanese could probably answer.

From the article: > the port sent a team of Syrian workers to fix the warehouse.

What's the purpose of mentioning that they're Syrian?

Probably because Syrians are considered cheap low quality labor (due to their desperation from having a decade long civil war), so it's kind'of like the US picking up laborers from Home Depot to figure out how to clean the Nukes.

Probably the contractor doing the job was using low paid incompetent Syrian refugees as workers.

I am not Lebanese but I am aware of all conflicts going in the region, Lebanon had the second largest number of Syrian refugees after Turkey and many of them are used there as cheap labour, so that also could go with what was mentioned earlier of corruption go hand in hand with incompetence, so getting a cheap labour to fix the door would mean very likely these people were not trained in handling or working in near proximity of dangerous chemicals, I think mentioning that they were Syrians would clarify the point, rather then accusing them of being the cause of the accident

> Lebanon had the second largest number of Syrian refugees after Turkey

And the most, per capita. (1M Syrians to 7M Lebanese means 13% or so of the people in Lebanon right now are Syrian refugees; Turkey has 3.6M across 83M, or 4%)

In both cases, the burden that these countries (and others like Jordan and Germany) are bearing, in response to the humanitarian apocalypse that is Syria right now, is very impressive. But 13% is absolutely staggering.

"Unskilled laborers" would have been a better turn of phrase.

Not to imply Syrians are generally so, but just probably so in this case given recent events and war refugee movements, unverifiable credentials, and available jobs, etc.

Syrian refugees are about 20% of the Lebanese population, so they're the bulk of the low-paid, low-skill labor force. (Low-skill not necessarily because they don't have any skills, but because the skills they have don't match what the Lebanese economy demands.)

Mentioning that they're Syrian is a shorthand for "they did it on the cheap".

This was kind of the case before the Syrian civil war though. "Unskilled" Labourers from Syria would work the week in Lebanon, live in miserable, cramped conditions, then go home for the weekend. Rinse/Repeat.

The earning power was simply different - and a Lebanese would rarely do it for the rates those jobs ended up paying because of the abundance of Syrians who were willing to do it in Lebanon.

It was a totally unnecessary detail. In my opinion it was dog whistling. Replace Syrian with "African" or "Jewish" and it shouldn't be any more or less outrageous of a detail to add. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24162563

just a correction Syrian is not a race Lebanese and Syrians or Jordanians are all arabs but you find different belief groups there, christians muslims (Shia and sunni and...) and more but most of them are Arabs if not all

They're all Arabs only in the sense that they speak Arabic. Syrians and Lebanese people are Levantine (with varying degrees of mixture with Arabs depending on subregion and religion - but the vast majority have primarily Levantine DNA). Nonetheless, modern DNA analysis can guess who is Lebanese and who is Syrian more often than not. The same goes for distinguishing a Nord from a Swede.

This sounds like where the US is heading. Corrupt. Greed. Lack of civil service, empathy, and duty. People have a right to be angry. They have a right to demand to fix the problems that lead to their loved ones exploding on a otherwise peaceful afternoon.

So Nasrallah forgets about 2750 tons of fertilizer in the middle of Beirut. I suggest you folks start thinking about what kind of shit he's hiding under your feet that he doesn't forget about.

Nasrallah is also on record of threatening to blow up a similar ammonium stash in Haifa; now that stash was moved upon this threat. Maybe he did Israel a big favor (implicitly) by means of these threats. https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.jpost.com/middle-east/nasrall...

It is funny (in a very dark way) how a couple of incompetent officials can destroy a city more efficiently than an opposing state-level actor with hundreds of rockets.

Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. …

-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

https://theunityprocess.com/on-stupidity-by-dietrich-bonhoef...

(More at the link. It's good.)

Maybe replace "stupid" with "corrupted and incompetent"

But not necessarily stupid (and then all the more dangerous)

No. Curruption follows its own (twisted)rationale, and incompetence is not necessarily stupidity (it may be mere lack of experience or expertise), though it can be.

Bonhoeffer's key is that stupidity is insensible to reason. You literally cannot out-think it. That's not true of corruption, and at least some incompetence.

Now imagine the nuclear weapons the US holds...

The way I've heard the story told it was an indifferent judge that kept ignoring letters from port officials who is the real culprit here. Is that not accurate?

> Focusing on the direct cause of the blast is a huge distraction from understanding why the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate were stored in the middle of Beirut for 7 years.

Exactly right. However, the answer to that question may only lead to more unsettling questions. Take care of yourself, your family and your friends.

It’s almost impossible to just blame one person or one group of people for disasters. There was a whole culture of incompetence or corruption or both going on here for all the wrong things to happen and sit for years.

I think trying to focus on blaming the government (who likely deserve significant blame) is itself a distraction from even more fundamental and uncomfortable truths about how a part of Beirut can be blown up.

I believe this might be a catalyst to resolve similar situations around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

"Around 1,400 tonnes of explosives remain on board, which continues to be a significant hazard."

Welding, roof work, grinding. Those three are responsible for a good chunk of all fires. I've done quite a bit of all three and have to confess that once or twice I was lucky rather than smart to have no bad effects from a very small mistake. When grinding, all it takes is a rag used to degrease something days before at 30' to set it on fire. When welding you really want to keep a very good idea of what is on the other side of your weld at all times. Surprise: a box member of a car filled with PU foam. I really never saw that one coming. And finally, when working on a roof a friend of mine did not properly calculate in the effect of an exothermic reaction in a vat of resin exposed to the sun. Close call that one, averted by denying oxygen to the already burning vat.

This one is on a completely different level though, and I'm sure that the welders did not live to tell the tale. Even so, before you go and claim they were stupid you have to take into account that this is Beirut, not exactly a place where the local OHSA is going to beat down the doors to ensure everything is done safely and by the book, that in a harbor there are always lots of dangerous things in close proximity and that they may have taken all possible precautions and still ended up drawing an unlucky card.

It really doesn't take much.

It really doesn't take much.

It really doesn't. You don't even need a grinder. Oily rags can ignite spontaneously. People usually laugh at the phrase "spontaneous combustion" because it's so often associated with "spontaneous human combustion." But actual "spontaneous combustion" does happen in certain (not uncommon) circumstances. See: https://www.nfpa.org/-/media/Files/Public-Education/Resource...

And what makes things even scarier, is realizing that buildings, ships, etc. that are either under construction or undergoing maintenance are more "at risk" because alarm systems, automatic fire suppression systems (eg, sprinklers), etc. are often times not in place yet, or disabled, while work is going on.

This is one reason it's so common to see a building complex that is under construction burn to the dirt if it catches fire, as opposed to a finished building where you might get a "room and contents" fire. No sheetrock, just miles and miles of exposed wood, no sprinklers, no alarm - recipe for disaster.

Oily rags are super dangerous. Depends on the type of oil or thinner but definitely something to keep in a small sealed metal container.

Linseed oil is the usual culprit. It oxidizes more readily than other oils at room temperature, and a pile of rags can insulate enough for the center to reach autoignition temperatures. The low smoke point for linseed oil also makes it well-suited for seasoning cast-iron cookware (only be sure, please, not to use boiled linseed oil, as it contains lead.)

>low smoke point for linseed oil

I would naively think you would want an oil with a high smoke point for seasoning. Can you elaborate on why a low smoke point is preferable?

You want it to smoke when seasoning. That's an indication that free-radicals are being created which set off the polymerization of the oil and create the seasoning. Low smoke-point oils are more convenient because they start polymerizing at lower temps.

You don't want it to smoke when cooking, because ingesting the free-radicals is generally considered unhealthy ;)

This is a glaring connection I rarely see people make.

In fact, I've been banging on about it for 15 or so years, and, I kid you not, you're the first person I've seen being this up.

Strange!

Unusual cross section of knowledge: I studied nutritional medicine in a formal capacity for four years 2000 through 2003 inclusive, and I'm also a welder by trade.

At the cross roads of knowledge domains interesting conclusions can be drawn, and sometimes fruitful cross pollination occurs. One thing about the successful founders that I know is that they are not confined to just one domain, and I have been wondering for a long time if that is a trait that helps them to be successful.

The free radicals don't stick around for very long, maybe seconds before they react with something else.

And cooking in general create a bunch of carcinogens like acrylamide, etc. You can reduce it, but it's tough to eliminate it completely.

My wife uses linseed oil on cast iron. Almost as good as non-stick. Linseed oil has a lot of triply unsaturated α-linolenic acid, which is reactive (due to multiple double bonds) and supports polymerization. A few thin layers of linseed oil added to cast iron and baked to the smoke point create a beautiful sheen and make it easy to clean.

Finally, a reply that is correct. Thank you; too many people leave seasoning up to being some mystery when it's really just that straightforward.

FWIW, I wrote this up a few years back after I went down the rabbit hole of seasoning pans, only to find that it's actually really simple and just as you describe: https://nuxx.net/blog/2014/01/24/well-seasoned-cast-iron-pan...

Linseed oil is just flaxseed oil, and I've found that the latter term is used in cooking contexts, whereas linseed oil is a term used in various industries that use industrial grade flaxseed oil.

I make this distinction because when I went to buy "linseed oil" to cook with on Amazon a while back, it brought me to various linseed oils that were not meant for human consumption.

Why would boiled oil have more lead?

Lead oxide is a catalyst to polymerization. For wiping down and protecting wooden tool handles it's nice to have the oil harden quicker at room temperatures.

On an industrial scale, sure. For home/hobby use, laying them flat until dry and stiff is plenty sufficient - I treat all such exothermic wood finishes with a great deal of care, but so long as you're not piling up rags or compressing them into a ball you're fine.

Personally I store them in a fireproof container meant to store ashes and inside that they are in ziplock bags. After I am done using them I burn them to get rid of them. Helps that I don’t need stuff like that often.

Probably not a good idea to store superglue and cotton together.

Combustion probably unlikely, but non-zero chance.

That reminds me of something. When I was a kid, I dumped a bunch of superglue on a cotton ball once and it didn’t even warm up. I wonder now what the actual conditions are for a superglue cotton fire.

The primary danger from oily rags is probably from slip and fall on the oil you're working with.

It takes very specific conditions to get oily rags to ignite. As a rule you're gonna have a hell of a time getting any lubricating oil specifically designed not to degrade in a high heat environment because the chemistry that keeps those oils stable over a long time at 200deg (or whatever) makes them very hard to ignite.

A friend left an oily rag in a bucket on a ladder where it was eventually exposed to midday sun; that was enough to ignite it. Fortunately we saw it just as it happened.

> buildings, ships, etc. that are either under construction or undergoing maintenance are more "at risk" because alarm systems, automatic fire suppression systems (eg, sprinklers), etc. are often times not in place yet, or disabled, while work is going on

Reminds me of the loss of the Normandie / Lafayette: "At 14:30 on 9 February 1942, sparks from a welding torch used by Clement Derrick ignited a stack of life vests filled with flammable kapok that had been stored in the first-class lounge. The flammable varnished woodwork had not yet been removed, and the fire spread rapidly. The ship had a very efficient fire protection system, but it had been disconnected during the conversion and its internal pumping system was deactivated." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Normandie#Fire_and_Capsizin...

Or the very recent fire on the USS Bonhomme Richard.

This kind of thing is surprisingly common. The recent fire on the USS Bonhomme Richard had a similar issue.

Since the ship was in maintenance, on-board fire-suppression systems had been disabled, delaying the onset of firefighting efforts, according to Admiral Sobeck

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Bonhomme_Richard_(LHD-6)#J...

Another one that didn't get as much national attention was the fire on the SSG Edward A. Carter, Jr at the Sunny Point Military Ocean Terminal back in 2001.

According to a subsequent Coast Guard report, the ship’s second assistant engineer started a transfer of about 20 tons of heavy fuel oil from the port and starboard overflow tanks to a central settling tank. The transfer was left unsupervised other than by automatic equipment.

“Their electronic system measured the tank levels and sounded an alarm if the preset levels were exceeded,” Sledge said. “If you are starting to overfill the tanks, it sounds a warning tone.”

Unfortunately, because cables to several tanks had become contaminated with fuel oil, false alarms had become a repeated nuisance. The easiest solution was to simply turn off the alarms.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120723160038/http://www.firewo...

The one time you need them...

> easiest solution was to simply turn off the alarms

This is so common... it's like the holy trinity of "Seconds from Disaster"

A local hardware store burned down a while ago because of an oily rag. They had a spill in the paint department, and the employee who cleaned it up wasn't aware of the precautions needed.

You don't hear about this danger as much as you used to--probably because a lot more paints are water-based than used to be the case.

You hear about stuff like that way more than you used to because every time you go on the internet you have to skim over the low effort comments pointing out the rare failure modes in which everything is dangerous to find the real content.

The world doesn't need a lecture on proper jack stand usage every time vehicles are mentioned and doesn't need a lecture on linseed oil fires every time deck finished are mentioned but it gets it anyway.

I for one am pretty happy about the linseed oil stories in this thread because the low ignition temperature is something that I wasn't aware of.

same

How? There's a warning on literally every product containing linseed oil even in the EU.

Products have warnings about approximately 100 gazillion things that can happen that basically no one reads.

I think that's true for Americanized consumer products which always seem to come with about 2-3 pages worth of "don't do this" in the manual. For stuff like paints it pretty much just says it on the tin: "Flammable. Harmful if swallowed. If ingested, contact poison control center. Do not induce vomiting."

The longest safety hints I've found in a survey of my paints cabinet were these:

> P102: Don't let kids play with this

> P301+310: IF INGESTED, rinse out of the mouth. Do NOT induce vomiting. Contact doctor immediately.

> EUH066: Repeated contact may cause brittle skin.

> EUH208: Contains lemons, wood oil, cobalt-2+-salts. Can induce allergic reactions.

> EU-VOC-limit (some numbers)

> Safety instructions: Rags and stuff drenched with this should be put in an enclose metal container or under water, since they can self-ignite. Note: product itself does not self-ignite.

If you're familiar with similar products you probably don't need to look at this - but if you use something for the first time, why wouldn't you spend the 10 seconds to understand these, in addition to the prep time you need to use a new type of finish anyway?!

I don't have any, never read the packaging, still appreciate the warning because I don't actually read the instructions on every bit of kit that I get, usually they are full of warnings that are either dead obvious ('may cause rash') or ass covering ('may cause cancer when ingested'). Over the years I've become quite numb to these which is a danger in and of itself.

So this is actually a strong motivator to start reading those anyway even for things that seem quite innocent.

When dealing with industrial stuff that I know is dangerous I go over the MSDS in detail and make sure I take all of the proper precautions.

And it makes me think of fires caused by accidental optical focusing of the sun such as a polished metal dog bowl as one odd example and others such as hanging glass artwork.

Or catching a translucent bottle of hand sanitizer sitting out in the console of your car

We had our windows washed last year and came home to a fresh burn mark on the floor in the hallway from where apparently the sun had been in the exact right spot with clean enough windows to focus a beam of light... We were fortunate that it didn't focus on something more flammable than a hardwood floor.

a buddy of mine is an architect. he wants to design a building with a concave facade such that when the sun is just right it produces basically a death ray. "imagine you're sitting in your office, causally glance out the window, and see a bird explode for seemingly no reason... " heh

The Walkie Talkie building in London has already achieved this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/20_Fenchurch_Street#Solar_gl...

So, Cathedral of Christ the Light in Oakland, basically.

I accidentally burned my dinning room table after leaving a magnifying work lamp on the table the night before that caught the sunlight through a window in just the right way to focus it onto the wood.

At my college appartment we had a fishbowl with glass fish in the window, which at the right time of year focused light just right on the couch. We saw a wisp of smoke one day, but there were several little burn marks in a line from previous days.

Talking about that, lots of lithium pouch thrown in bins. Be warned.

ps: some videos to show how stupid a rag setup goes into fire https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=self%20combusti...

> Oily rags can ignite spontaneously.

That happened to a friend of mine. He was doing some woodworking and threw a linseed-oil soaked rag in the trash, then went to work. He returned home to his apartment on fire and a bunch of firetrucks blocking the driveway. Linseed oil apparently spontaneously combusts at 120 degrees and generates heat as it dries, so it can cause a fire in normal 70-80 degree weather.

Woah. I feel like I might have heard about Linseed oil’s propensity to spontaneously combust but forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder.

Woodworkers are warned all the time about this. Lots of fires caused by hobbyists finishing furniture that aren't aware of it.

Speaking of spontaneous combustion - ammonium nitrate will spontaneously ignite in the presence of some impurities.

Ammonium nitrate plus zinc powder is a mixture that only needs a drop of water or just sufficiently humid air to ignite.

Another one is just plain ole organic matter, like mulch. Back in my days as a firefighter, our district included the county landfill. After one of the hurricanes that came through, they had gone around collecting all the downed trees, and chipped them up into mulch, and located this HUGE pile of mulch at the landfill, where county residents could come and get free mulch / wood chips for their gardens or whatever. Sounds great, right?

Except it turns out that a huge mountain of decaying organic matter, left exposed to the southeast NC sun in July and August will periodically catch fire spontaneously. We went out there a few times to put that mess out. Not an easy task. You have to bring in heavy machinery to dig into the piles in order to get to the seat of the fire...and of course the landfill was nowhere near a hydrant, so we had to call out half the tankers in the county to set up a tanker shuttle... uuugggh.

The sun is actually not much of a factor in there. What makes this happen is that the mulch rots which is an exothermic process and it insulates very good as well. So the core temperature of pile will slowly creep up until you reach the ignition point. The same will happen to bales of hay that are taken from the field too wet.

bales of rotting wet hay is where barn fires come from.

Yep. They also sometimes spontaneously combust in the field.

Yes they do. We went to more than a few hay bale fires as well. Those are also a pain in the ass, and for similar reasons.

So what's the procedure like? Pull them apart and then put it out? I'd assume that if you just wet them from the outside you are just setting yourself up for a speedy return to the same location.

So what's the procedure like? Pull them apart and then put it out?

Exactly. Besides trapping heat in, the hay also forms a fairly effective barrier against water getting inside. If you don't rip the bale apart to fully extinguish the seat of the fire, you just wind up right back out there.

You can see the process underway in this video, where a bunch of hay bales caught file while on the back of a truck being transported. Scroll a few minutes into the video and you can see where they brought a front-end loader out there to start ripping the bales apart.

Using a "wetting agent"[1] also helps, and some departments will use store bought dish soap, like Dawn, for that purpose (purpose made firefighting foam is kinda expensive).

https://youtu.be/z1_pAH34wAo

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfactant

Interesting video, especially with a drone over so much hot air. Amazing how much land is already gone. And the truck itself is just a memory while plenty of the bales of hay are still sitting around unharmed, you can really see the 'R' value at work there.

It almost looks as though the fire started in the truck itself or on one of the rear brakes, was there a report on the cause of the fire in this particular case?

edit: amazing coordination as well, at one point working on the fire in four different places.

It almost looks as though the fire started in the truck itself or on one of the rear brakes, was there a report on the cause of the fire in this particular case?

I'm afraid I don't know. :-(

What makes this happen is that the mulch rots which is an exothermic process and it insulates very good as well. So the core temperature of pile will slowly creep up until you reach the ignition point.

Absolutely true. But while I wouldn't even be able to begin quantifying the degree to which the radiant heat from the sun is a factor, I strongly suspect that it is a factor, if for no other reason that the observation that we only went to those fires in summer months. But, to be fair, there could be a million other confounding factors.

Whether or not a given system ignites on a given day depends on many things: ambient temperature, wind, humidity, presence of accelerants, yadda, yadda, yadda.

I suspect this is one reason why it's so hard to get people to take fire safety seriously: that pile of oily rags in the corner? It's not going to catch fire. This time. Or next time. Or next time. And so on... until it does. So people get complacent because "hey, the oily rags never caught fire before, why would I expect them to today?" Disconnect the sprinkler system? Sure, why not - the building isn't going to catch fire. This time...

I know the former head fire marshall of a major European city (2M inhabitants). The stories about root causes have made me extra fire safety sensitive and it is a continuous source of frustration to me that others don't take this stuff as serious. Cheap power adapters are somewhere near the top of my paranoia list, anything rechargeable battery operated a close second.

Fun fact, the metabolism of the sun produces about as much energy per unit volume as a pile of mulch.

You have to bring in heavy machinery to dig into the piles in order to get to the seat of the fire

Wouldn't that expose more of it to oxygen and thus increase the fire's strength? Or does it generate oxygen itself?

Wouldn't that expose more of it to oxygen and thus increase the fire's strength?

Yes, but there really isn't much else in the way of practical choices. If you had some 100% bullet-proof way to seal the fire off from any oxygen, then eventually it would go out and cool below it's ignition temperature. But "bury it in sand (or concrete)" isn't a practical solution for the average fire. Beyond that, you could play around with piercing nozzles and more wetting agents / foam and what-not and try to avoid digging the pile up, but generally speaking those things would be too time consuming for the typical fire department.

Consider that any time you're on a call, that apparatus and crew are not available to respond to other, perhaps more urgent, calls. So fire departments typically try to avoid spending excess time on the scene of a relatively low hazard fire like a mulch pile. You can't just ignore it completely, because embers from that fire could then spread and cause another fire, etc. So you have to show up and deal with it, but you want to get done as soon as possible.

A private / industrial fire brigade might take a different approach, because they are operating under different constraints.

All of that said, there is one particular case where "bury it in sand" might be used in a setting that a typical municipal FD might run into. That case would involve a Class D (flammable metals)[1] fire. Those are notoriously hard to extinguish and "bury it" is a valid option. So if a FD had some industrial areas in their district, where a factory was, say, making something out of magnesium or another flammable metal, and somehow managed to catch a load of the stuff on fire, it's entirely possible that the response would be "Call in DOT (or whoever) and have them bring a couple of dump truck loads of sand to the scene". There are specialized fire extinguishers for this stuff[2], but they're expensive, only contain so much extinguishing agent, and aren't - in my experience - commonplace on fire apparatus.

In practice, this situation doesn't come up terribly often. And a plant or factory working with lots of flammable metals in high volume might well have a private industrial fire brigade that specializes in fighting those fires.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_class#Metal

[2]: https://www.monroeextinguisher.com/product/ansul-redline-30-...

Spreading woodchips dumped shortly before first snow some years back, I noted on a well-below-freezing day that the centre of my woodchips pile was straming & smoking.

Chips melted through a few inches of snow when laid down on garden paths, and remained clear of snow for at least several days.

No explosions.

I had a water heater almost start a fire recently. Installer didn't shield some plastic insulated cable at a point where it exited through a metal hole. Small nick in the insulation plus a little time. It made several 4 inch diameter black spots before the breaker blew.

I was once treating my window ledge with Linseed Oil and was quite surprised when the cloth set on fire from direct sunlight ignited!

> when working on a roof a friend of mine did not properly calculate in the effect of an exothermic reaction in a vat of resin exposed to the sun

I see now. The other two were obvious, but roof work seemed counter-intuitive. But if epoxy is used in the process, then yeah, I totally see that. I ended up with a garage full of smoke a couple times from working with more resin than I really needed for my projects.

Roof work sometimes involves applying tarpaper with a.small flame thrower. That genereates quite a few fires.if you are not careful.

Yup. My uncle's house burned down, years ago, due to careless use of a torch to apply tar roofing.

It blows my mind that the torch isn't fed with two hoses: One of propane-or-whatever, and one of CO2. If something goes badly, you literally move one finger and start extinguishing the fire.

Why on earth would you want the problem closer at-hand than the solution?

That's simple - cost and convenience. You would have to buy, maintain and lug to the roof yet another heavy preassure vessel. Also twice the hoses & more likely the two will get entangled.

Having a fire extinguisher at hand seems like a better option.

But presumably also the common use of big torches for materials like torch-on-felt?

Retrospectively we came to the conclusion that he had mixed in too much hardener. Incredible how fast that went. From 'hot to the touch' to 'poof'. Nearly colorless flame too, super dangerous. Fortunately I got it covered before it got worse. That wasn't heroic either, I had to get past the bloody vat to get to safety so I figured I'd better stop it burning first.

Before I got my auto-darkening mask when first learning GTAW welding I had a few close calls. The window is so dark you simply have no sense that a fire has started until it may be too late, you can't see anything at all unless it's the brightness of a lightning bolt.

Even with the auto-darkening window the field of view is substantially reduced.

I wonder if in the future welding masks will integrate fire alarms.

May end up being a good use for a VR headset. Pass-through video with HDR support.

This is actually how HDR image processing was invented:

http://wearcam.org/mannventionz/mannglas.htm

Steve Mann is a super interesting and very nice character.

Oh that Steve Mann.

Yeah I probably fished that idea out of long term memory.

So besides 1) looking like a cyberman and 2) likely being dangerously clunky for working up high, I wonder why these didn't take off?

This seems like such a cool idea that I wonder if anyone's already working on it. I've only done the most meager amount of welding, but the "position the tools exactly where you need them to be, snap your head to flip the visor down, do the task while barely being able to see what you're doing, then manually flip the visor back up" workflow seems like it could be improved. The auto-darkening visors mean less fiddling with the mask, but you still can't really see what you're doing, and I think the jury is out on whether or not long-term use of the auto-darkening visors will damage your eyes based on the teensy amount of flash exposure you get with each weld. I wonder if a specialized camera could provide better visibility in the extreme brightness.

I meant to ask: Do you guys close your eyes for a moment when you start the weld, or just burn your retinas a little bit?

Sounds like the latter...

I believe my machinist friends call this the "safety squint". :P Their attitude appears to be that a little bit of flash from occasional welding isn't going to hurt you; it's the professional welders who're at it all day who need to take the most care.

I’ve heard it as the OSHA squint although I do like the alliteration of your’s.

I close my eyes. And I have a pretty fast set of glasses even so it's not enough to be able to avoid a blind spot after an hour or more of work. Better safe than sorry. The auto darkening glasses make it much easier to start a weld though, you know exactly where you are relative to the workpiece, which especially with stick welding is the difference between a lot of cursing + frustration and some reasonably good work.

The dynamic range for the types of sensors needed would be immense, even with Neutral Density filters...sounds like a fun project!

I’ve seen pictures on reddit of guys using a piece of cardboard and a smartphone as a “welding mask”.

Interestingly, I've seen the equivalent of this on the low end - workers in third-world machine shops or electronics recycling places with an opaque block between them and the workpiece, with a cell phone and its camera slotted into a cutout. Just look at the phone screen, not the workpiece.

they will not. ever. wanna know why? economics. until economy is taken out, it will always prevail

That's why we have rules, regulations, and laws.

exactly my point. economy is taken out when you apply a law or a regulation

on what OP idea suggested we currently have market/economy as the one that dictates it, hence none implemented this

> I wonder if in the future welding masks will integrate fire alarms.

I don't really see that as a feature anyone wants.

It's pretty easy and straightforward to buy a fire/CO alarm and keep it near you. If you need to be mobile, it seems straight forward to put them on a cheap chest rig.

I get that there might be some convenience factor involved, but:

1. It's pretty terrible UX to add weight to people's heads. Even a little bit makes everything a lot worse.

2. Having an alarm integrated into a mask is going to a Gillette razor blades / HP inkjet situation, where the alarms have to be changed out every 6 months and cost $200. There is great virtue in staying on the path of high volume and multiple suppliers.

I could see it being an additional feature to AR masks, add a ir sensor and some machine learning to classify as welding spark vs material or liquid fire and you don't need to change parts.

Modern auto-dark shields have periferal vision windows.

One of the most used brands around these parts is SpeedGlas by 3M

https://www.awsi.com.au/3m-speedglas-9100xxi-welding-helmet-...

I consider a CO2 Fire extinguisher as standard as a metal brush. Keep it just as close as your brush and the pin out. I used to TiG and the fire risk is at least predictable and reasonably avoidable. With a MiG, you can start a fire 8 feet away.

The auto-dark can be a mixed bag as you leave it down longer and less likely to notice a fire due to the field of view that you mention.

I'm not sure how you would build a fire alarm. Coatings tend to smoke so detecting ionized air would probably just drive you nuts.

An AvE aphorism:

    If your welds sound like bacon you’re doin’ just fine. If they smell like bacon, partner, you’re on fire.

Given he has covered a couple of deadly crane collapses, I'll be surprised if he doesn't end up talking about this accident too.

I had never heard that one. I do have a strong memory of a small bit of spatter from a welding arc ending up in my boot. Never knew I could dance that well. That's why I prefer to never use resin core for wire welding because it spatters like mad. Better use solid core and gas, if it is available (unfortunately not always).

I do have a strong memory of a small bit of spatter from a welding arc ending up in my boot. Never knew I could dance that well.

I had the same experience during Welding class in high-school. Not fun. :-(

I'll add that if you're not wearing an apron, definitely don't tuck in your shirt!

I hope that you got by the particular bit of knowledge in the theoretical rather than the practical manner.

Quite. Once I was cutting out the rusted exhaust of a commercial truck with an ox-acetylene torch when the guy two bays away from me decided it was a good time to apply underbody coat to a new truck. The head mechanic started screaming and running around opening bays and we both stopped, probably saving us all.

This is also a reason why many industrial shops (manufacturing or major repair centers) have separate bays for things like that. It's harder to set up for smaller operations, but by keeping them physically separated (never applying paint or flammable things in the vicinity of where a welding torch might be used) you eliminate a great deal of risk.

> Surprise: a box member of a car filled with PU foam.

Groan. I (novice) lit my Xterra on fire while welding on the wheel well. I was going at it and then heard that "whoomph" you never want to hear, and thick white smoke started coming from under the dash. Taking a chance, I ran to grab a small fire extinguisher, pointed it up under the dash, and emptied it. The cabin was full of that nasty powder but the fire stopped, and I never did find what was on fire. All the wiring seemed to work by some miracle. But yeah, that could easily have taken the house with it. Definitely know what's behind the weld.

Crappy electrical appliances (anything that charges a battery, powers a heating element or spins a low torque electric motor) cause far more fires then welding and grinding and other hazardous operations that internet commenters love to clutch pearls over are just so rare by comparison.

For every hour that someone has an arc struck there's a battery sitting on a charger for an order of magnitude more hours.

That's all true. But: this is in the context of people at work, in particular welders, who just caused a gigantic explosion leveling a good chunk of a major city.

Similar accidents have cause the Notre Dame to be damaged multiple large boats to become extremely large paper weights and so on.

Clearly a battery or a heating element or any electric motor (low torque or not isn't all that important really) are also sources of fires. But that's in a different context and typically will not cause disasters of this magnitude due to the difference in context of application.

What with a pretty good overlap between the 'hacker' and 'maker' scene it shouldn't surprise you that on HN people have seen a disproportionate number of fires or almost fires from rather more interesting causes than their electric blankie or battery charger. Though I'm sure that they happened too, none in my life so far.

> It really doesn't take much.

I always remember the Imperial Sugar Factory. _Dust_ is enough. Sugar dust is violently explosive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws

Dust is pretty much ideal from a reactive surface point of view, it is even better than a fluid because it readily mixes with air and is immediately explosive in that combination, the activation energy required to set it off is next to nothing.

> It really doesn't take much.

Setting fire to ones own clothes is surprisingly easy with a grinder, and when you’re up a ladder that’s particularly bad.

Oh. That is a recipe for disaster or a rapid improvement in your climbing skills. Ladders are dangerous regardless, combining them with other dangerous tools (chainsaws, for instance) sounds like a multiplication of Morts rather than an addition.

I think you're completely correct. The San Diego ship fire basically totaled a amphibious assault ship (helo carrier) was also apparently caused by a welding accident.

If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous.

The real question is, why were the explosives there?

But pursuing that question might make powerful people uncomfortable, or lead to less satisfying conclusions about institutions deliberately designed to disperse accountability.

> The real question is, why were the explosives there?

In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure?

It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it.

Highly structured and rule driven practices are key to all safety. Hospitals, military, airlines all depend on a rigid set of safety instructions that are followed without exceptions.

Same goes for explosives. Many governments around the world set various different rules around storage of explosives, and the Beirut port explosion was a result of ignoring pretty much all of them. It's an example of what happens when the government isn't there to do its job.

I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action. The Port Authority? The courts? The Army? The General Directorate of State Security?

This Reuters article is maddening, but it hits much closer to the truth than all the pointless "welding is dangerous" threads going on right now around us:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-do...

The hypothesis I tend to reach for is a general lack of "good government", originating because the factional tension in Lebanon completely overshadows any other political differentiation. The factions can't compete on competence because votes are locked in by group identity.

> I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action.

That's exactly the problem. They weren't either.

In an advanced country with a modern legal system, like, say, Australia, the answer to your question is:

Every single person who knew the dangers is personally liable for up to $50,000 for an individual, if I recall correctly.

And for industrial manslaughter the maximum penalty is 20 years jail and AU$10 million for a business operator:

https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/business-fine...

The concentration camps aren’t a mark of the effectiveness of the legal system so much as one of the political system - as inexcusable as they are, the country still manages to have mechanisms of state to administer airspace, health and safety and so on.

But those institutions are fragile, especially when they're exposed to the political system (robodebt and the Murray-Darling authority spring to mind) but it’s also possible for dangerous situations to evolve in pretty well-defined regulatory frameworks. There’s a bunch of case law around situations such as buildings that failed inspections under one code or another, then caught fire and destroyed neighbouring property before the compliance deadline had elapsed. Common law negligence is there to catch these sorts of cases, but it’s much more of a way to assign liability than to guide behaviour.

I haven’t followed the West Footscray fire from a couple of years ago, but it definitely had the signs of something that slipped through the cracks between regulations, which leaves it a matter of luck that it wasn’t something super duper toxic, explosive, or flammable and under pressure.

> In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure? It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it.

This class of problem isn’t unique to governments. Modern society has a whole host of problems that are caused by externalities generated by corporations.

The common thread is that in both cases, those entities and individuals closest to the problem have strong incentives to do nothing (prevention is a thankless, costly task), and so it falls to the general populace to create incentives to hold them accountable.

And you will be blamed for imperfect prevention. Say that the army spent $20,000 moving the fertilizer to a disposal site. Would someone get in trouble for that? Yep.

-This is not meant as a witticism, but suggesting the Lebanese government is 'highly structured and rule driven' is giving it way too much credit.

Cynical me find the explanation that AN fertiliser simply is too cheap more likely - it simply wasn't worth the effort to -ahem- reallocate the resources from the warehouse it was stored in.

To be honest it doesn't even have to be that high level. Corruption can stack: you bribe the guy at the customs so it is declared as sth else for example — suddenly the AM you are storing is mountain dew. Or you bribe some other clerk to not file it in a certain category. Suddenly it is not dangerous.

You could even imagine a chain of corruption (=paid lies) to lead to such an outcome. Assuming the on-paper representation of a world a corrupt society produces is accurate enough to base meaningful decisions on them is very optimistic at least.

What was extraordinary was the scale of the blast and the human tragedy it produced. But the fact that it happened wasn't very surprising to anyone who knows a bit about the Lebanon.

I was watching some Feynman interview recently and he was talking about how one day noodling with a geiger counter he found a hot spot in an storage room, and discovered that the operations people were storing uranium in suspension, and either the ratio was wrong, or the tanks were too big, and so the neutron flux was too high.

Since the nuclear physics was all highly classified, they couldn't just explain the entire situation directly, but he played up the severity to make sure people paid attention (because the next mistake would be much worse).

They reworked the guidelines, and as part of this they also had to point out that storing two tanks of uranium in separate rooms but on the same wall was also a really exceptionally bad idea.

If you can tell people what's going on, there is plenty of room for human error. If you can't tell them, for any reasons ranging from graft to state secrets, well then you've got a much bigger surface area for disasters.

> early this year they had learned that one of the warehouse's doors was broken, raising the risk that a malicious actor could steal dangerous explosives. The port's welding contractors set off the cache while trying to repair the door to protect the cache.

I'm reminded of a maxim I heard somewhere about failures in complex systems: "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure".

>... "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure".

When those failure-prevention mechanisms are bolt-on solutions that make a complex system even more complex, perhaps that's not surprising.

In this case, for example, the complex system needed to be simplified, by removing the explosives. But instead it was made more complex.

> If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous.

Having indications that it was a work accident is good because that all but excludes terrorism or, worse, acts of a hostile nation. That is the last thimg the world needs right now.

Within minutes of the explosion making the rounds on Twitter, people began to speculate that the Mossad blew up something, that the Hezbollah or some ISIS remnants fucked up some new weapon or whatever, or that the old religio-ethnic rift would be an open war again.

> Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

That sentence is nearly unbelievable, like something from a cartoon show. How much incompetence can you layer upon further incompetence to reach this insane level of danger?

The CSB has a number of YouTube videos detailing how industrial accidents happen, and it's almost always flame, sparks, gasses, corrosion, and a fuel source.

Nobody is going to get paid for being safe, few care about learning it,fewer are going to get paid teaching it, and few are going to be listened to.

The "safe guy" is going to be the butt end of the jobs because they cost more, get it done slower, and aren't going to work on unsafe places. It's all about get it done and if someone dies that's the cost of doing business and that's on the worker.

I think OP was referring to "fireworks stored next to ammonium nitrate." Fireworks are stupidly hazardous and should never be stored around high explosives. If the sparks had hit only the ammonium nitrate (because the fireworks had been properly disposed of or at least stored in a reasonable configuration), there's a good chance the fire would not have started.

I worked in a factory where some other employees seemed to view safety as something that is in direct opposition to masculinity. So that's another factor that contributes to it.

A few selected videos to this point:

Fireworks Disposal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rktMzw2fd28

City of West, TX fertilizer explosion

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdDuHxwD5R4

Hot Work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWkcuR0adeI

Clearly you've never been in or worked in gov organizations. It's far more common than you think and easy to think, "it can't possibly happen here or to me."

In the U.S. institutions like OSHA, USCSB, NTSB, and the FAA are vilified, but the rules they enforce have been written with blood.

I had the same thought. A scene from the Simpsons.

And the thought occurs that those might have been Hezbollah rockets rather than fireworks. Is there a culture of setting off fireworks in Beirut in particular, or Lebanon in general?

Yeah, Arabs in general are super into fireworks - mostly on the personal-size firecrackers scale, but put enough of those together in a pile and you'll get a good ignition source.

Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

Seems a little unfair to blame this solely on welders -- the root cause was whoever decided it was a good idea to store 2700 tons of explosive fertilizer so close to a city.

Secondary is whoever decided it was a good idea to store fireworks in the warehouse that stored this explosive fertilizer.

Last on the list is the welders that were told to work on this door near the fireworks and fertilizer.

Forgot the people who thought it'd be a good idea to contract welders to do the work knowing what stored nearby.

>explosive fertilizer

Seems it may have been made for use as a straight explosive rather than fertilizer: https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/12907955327014256...

Note that this is specifically in a form factor made for mining explosives (i.e. to be mixed with oil at the worksite to make ANFO) - not necessarily very convenient for military use.

I don't understand why they'd store a cache of fireworks next to a cache of ammonium nitrate. And what kind of rent-a-welder wouldn't be aware enough of their surroundings and the associated risks that they wouldn't properly secure the perimeter from sparks?

I'm not the conspiratorial type, but it really does seem like there's some other information that we're not getting.

"People did something dumb" hardly requires a conspiracy.

That's pretty much the prerequisite to all conspiracies: attributing to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.

As the saying goes: Don't attritubute to malice that which could easily be attributed to stupidity

Also known as "Hanlon's razor" :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Huge ammonium nitrate explosions have happened too many times before.[1] Last big one in the US was in 2015 in Texas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ammonium_nitrate_disas...

Beirut's government is notoriously dysfunctional and incompetent at the basic tasks of governance. When I was there some years back, there were huge protests precipitated by this incompetence, and that was half a decade ago. People tend to underestimate how much institutional capital is involved in basic governmental tasks running smoothly, even in a country as politically polarized and dysfunctional as, say, the US. It's very plausible to me that this was just a result of that incompetence.

I agree. Most likely it was plain incompetence or lack of care. Judging from the handling of COVID it seems the US is determined to catch up to Beirut in making everything a political issue and destroying the institutions that make everyday life work smoothly.

This requires incompetence all the way up and down the line though. From the welders to the president.

Great catastrophes require the collaboration of lots of people.

Considering the state of Lebanon before this, total incompetence would not come as any sort of surprise.

The most important thing I learned from studying engineering ethics/failure analysis is that most major failures are caused by an accumulation of tiny failures (of both process and material) that, while not individually disastrous, collaborate to cause enormous damage. The "academic" engineering failures (Challenger explosion, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25) all had that in common, as did the 747-MAX issue and this.

How Complex Systems Fail

https://how.complexsystems.fail/

Engineering a Safer World by Leveson [0], as well. Goes into great detail about these ideas, how to model them, and how to build safety into systems deliberately rather than as an afterthought.

[0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/engineering-safer-world

I wish engineering education paid dues to _engineering processes_ that cause situations like you listed above. I wonder what kind of process failure happened in Lebanon.

As far as I know, ABET still requires an Engineering Ethics course (that will certainly cover the canonical examples) for their accreditation. That's a good start (it's certainly where I got my start in thinking about those issues).

The same logic holds true for gun safety. A person usually has to make two mistakes in order to have a negligent discharge. For example if you fail to engage the safety and then pull the trigger accidentally, you made two mistakes.

Yeah, that's a pretty canonical example, since the safety is the bit of the system designed to keep the other bits from doing accidental damage.

Not just limited to engineering, you also just described one hypothesis for the manifestation of biological cancers through systems biology. "Most solid tumors arise from a spectrum of genetic, epigenetic, and chromosomal alterations. [...] molecular alterations can be classified by dysfunction in as many as six different regulatory systems that must be perturbed for a normal cell to become cancerous [...] The mere recognition of cancer as a systems biology disease is a key first step. This hypothesis views the individual defects observable in solid tumors cumulatively as system failures either at the cellular or multicellular level." [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666950/

[1] http://news.mit.edu/2017/cells-combat-chromosome-imbalance-0...

Yeah...watch NTSB Board meetings...it's a recurring theme.

https://www.youtube.com/user/NTSBgov/videos

The thing is, the modern economy is such a complex marvel that "incompetence" is the default state. I certainly couldn't put on welding gear and be a competent welder tomorrow, and there's an entire spectrum of competence and ability to fake competence between me and a master welder. It's extremely non-trivial for a large organization to push competency down to the lowest levels of the org tree, and that goes doubly for large organizations like governments with loose accountability feedback loops.

That’s pretty common. Once people see other people getting away with or even being rewarded for incompetence or unethical behavior they will also wonder why should go through the trouble of doing their job properly. I have seen that in companies too. Once you see a team taking shortcuts at the expense of quality and being rewarded for their speed other teams will follow soon.

Why did a ship headed for Mozambique detour to Lebanon in the first place?

Why didn't it? Did you check the other 364 days of the year for ships doing detours? If not, why do you assume it isn't a perfectly normal thing?

This is very important to remember. I think there's a tendency when these events happen, to pull out circumstantial details without realizing how routine they may actually be, and treat them like they 'add up' to a b-movie narrative. Hopefully one of many lessons to come from this is for people to have discipline not to transform it into a conspiracy.

It was broken.

That's the real problem here is that many states are defenseless against the actions of private entities. What would your local authority do if some russians just abandoned three thousand tons of fertilizer in your harbor?

And Egypt doesn't have repair facilities?

Mine?

They'd use a local hazardous waste disposal company and bill the ship owners the cost of the disposal.

Congratulations, you have the privilege of living in a functional society. Many people do not.

You're obviously lucky enough to live in a country whose military is powerful enough and whose economy is large enough that they can enforce those bills (i.e. the ship owners would mind never doing business with you again).

>bill the ship owners the cost of the disposal

Would you like to know how I know you have no idea of what occurred up to this point?

The captain and shiphands were arrested and put in jail. They were eventually released because the Russian owner of this ship abandoned them and had little to do with the actual problem that was occurring.

They were never going to get any money from the owner.

At this point they should have auctioned off the material to recuperate costs. No need for hazardous waste disposal, it is a useful economic product. Instead it was stored for six years, this was totally on the local government.

Such a waste of a windfall. They confiscated a valuable farming additive that could have boosted domestic harvests for several (many?) years. It was dangerous to store so why not sell it to local farmers at cost (virtually nothing) and get it into the ground? Instead of a food shortage they could be enjoying a food surplus.

>What would your local authority do if some russians just abandoned three thousand tons of fertilizer in your harbor?

Milk it in the news for maximum virtue signaling then dispose of it in the least economically efficient way possible with the inefficiency being directed at the bank accounts of those politically connected.

I assume that a government that can't rely on the letter in brackets beside their name to get them reelected might do things differently.

The only odd thing I've seen is a video from late July of a car or something on fire in Beirut allegedly from an Israeli missile.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-Yakungkjc

Hanlon's razor seems rather appropriate here

There is no need to hunt for a conspiracy theory. Once the decision was made by their judiciary to store thousands of tons of explosives near a major population center, the important question ceases to be about what random unexpected event happens to be the one that sets it off. The probability of disaster was clearly going to integrate to one over some timescale. The failure was systemic. The tragedy was inevitable. It's actually kind of amazing it took this long to happen.

There is no indication that it was "the judiciary's decision" to store it "near a major population center".

That's a story floated by the head of customs to try and shift the blame to the judiciary. But there is no evidence for it, and there is much evidence against it.

Source: The court documents released by journalists Riad Kobeisyi and Dima Sadek.

I think the storage was one of convenience. Ship was at the docks, so store it at the docks. Who would have thought it would have taken 6 years? The next problem is this 2750 tons of material. You're talking around 70 semi loads to carry it all off. This has to be funded by someone, who?

I’m sure they could have destroyed the fireworks and sold the fertilizer to some farmers if they really wanted to. That would quickly pay for itself.

I still can't wrap my head around this, even if you can't sell it you can still find ways to get rid of both.

I mean, at the bare minumum someone must have been willing to take this stuff off the states hands at least for free, right? A Google search says 500$ a ton for it

Very few people need explosive grade ammonium nitrate in this quantity and also prefer a source that has no provenance, and pay some fraction of 1.3 Million list price over their established supply chain.

And in fact, the judge ordered the government to either sell it off or put it in safe storage... about 6 years ago.

spot on.

Honestly stop at "I don't understand"

There is not one thing that went right here. Every single thing you could do wrong was done.

AN should never be stored for long periods of time.

AN should never be stored near organics, flammables, or any heat generating item.

AN should never be stored in urban/residential areas.

AN should be stored in secured environments and in the smaller amounts separated by distance or berms to protect against a incidence causing the entire cache going up.

These idiots were criminally negligent on a scale rarely seen.

It would add a lot of force to your comment and its conclusion if you could cite a webpage making similar concrete recommendations from prior to this incident.

[I'm not doubting it exists-- I mean the above sincerely. Your point would be a lot more forceful if you showed it wasn't hindsight bias.]

https://www.atf.gov/explosives/table-distances

That is an example of the kind of tables that exist that show what can be stored with and near what, and how much. Storing of explosives is well understood. They try these explosives in various quantities, near each other, with different heat and other effects applied. Through these experiments and through real-world accidents and catastrophes they know what shouldn't be done. What happened here was an example of what shouldn't be done.

https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/standardinterpretations/2014-...

This stuff is all pretty common sense. Since when do you need a "webpage making concrete recommendations" to know that storing thousands of tons of explosives in a single place in major city is a disaster waiting to happen?

I do not mean to denigrate the skill of workers in other countries, but being less regulated / process oriented has its downsides in that you can have a higher variance in skill level. Beirut is not undeveloped, but even developed countries sometimes do things in sketchy, hazardous ways.

> I don't understand why they'd store a cache of fireworks next to a cache of ammonium nitrate.

You assume a decision was actively made. I think it was more that they ended up there after being seized and then nobody made any decisions after that.

Seems like a decision was made, repeatedly, to do nothing about it, while knowing it was an issue.

https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/hezbollah-denies-...

> Former port worker Yusuf Shehadi confirmed this account to The Guardian on Thurday. In his recollection, "30-40 nylon bags of fireworks" had been stored in the same warehouse as the cargo of ammonium nitrate for many years. Port workers and customs officials were well aware that both of these consignments were on site and potentially dangerous, and they had raised the issue multiple times, he said. “Every week, the customs people came and complained and so did the state security officers. The army kept telling them they had no other place to put this. Everyone wanted to be the boss, and no one wanted to make a real decision," Shehadi said.

In retrospect they should’ve sold the AN to farmers and then fought over who gets the money.

Some theorize that the ammonium nitrate was already being sold off bit by bit on he black market as the harder to procure half of ANFO, and for a lot more than farmers would be willing to pay. Even carting off 500kg a week, after 4 years when 2750 tons turned into 2650, would anyone notice?

And what kind of rent-a-welder wouldn't be aware enough of their surroundings and the associated risks that they wouldn't properly secure the perimeter from sparks?

One that's trying to eat. Lebanon was already having economic problems: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/10/world/middleeast/lebanon-...

I'm willing to bet the poor welders didn't even know about the fireworks and ammonium nitrate and probably didn't think to ask. The guys that hired them problem did, though.

According to the link, the welders were Syrian workers. So they might well have been an even more precarious position than your average Lebanese citizen.

I don't think one needs mich fantasy to imagine how a corrupt government in a country with corruption on every level oft the society gets something horribly wrong.

Corruption means you pay someone to bend the rules, to write down things wrongly, to actually honour the rules they are bending constantly etc.

So if you assume that in both cases (fireworks + ammonium nitrate) corruption was involved to bend the rules, maybe nobody really knew this was actually the case? Totally feasible.

Not to speak badly about Lebanese welders, but have you ever been to a middle eastern nation and seen how they do work safety? It is a wonder that such things don't happen a little more often.

> Not to speak badly about Lebanese welders,

The article states that the welders were Syrian. I am guessing they are refugees just trying to get by. Even assuming they were well trained and safety minded, it's reasonable to assume they did not have the power to tell their bosses, "this is unsafe so we're not gonna do it."

I am not going to reject outright the possibility of some nefarious plot, but corruption and bureaucratic incompetence explain all of the facts perfectly.

Basically, incompetence. Happens everywhere, but especially in places where people just don't care much about anything (I am from such a country).

People who stored the fireworks didn't know about the ammonium nitrate, not their problem.

Welders didn't know anything. They just came to do their job.

Safety standards are just not a thing in many places. It's even considered a joke among many workers - you gotta work fast, not care about your ears/hands/eyes/cars/surroundings etc. It's sad.

People managing the warehouse also didn't know about what's going on, and likely didn't care enough to find out.

The kind that was sent in to ignite the fireworks and detonate the “bomb”?

The first frame of that 1st video when the explosion hits is morbidly fascinating. The image looks almost as if it is pieced together from torn paper.

https://i.imgur.com/1GkJgxt.png

Is this because shock wave compresses air and makes it refractive like water so it almost looks like there is a water droplet where the explosion originates?

That feels plausible. I think the effect of shock on the camera sensor also plays a part.

Seems like a combination of that and what seems like some algorithm performing temporal denoising on the video going haywire from the quick moving picture.

This looks like an early frame, a couple of seconds before the shock wave reaches the camera. That is why there are so many clear videos, as it takes a while for the shock wave to reach the observers - if you are 3 kilometers away, you have 10 seconds to watch the explosion, before it hits you.

Camera sensors should also not generate artifacts due to shock, unless they fail. But what is possible, that very fast moving subjects create artifacts in the image due to the limited shutter speed.

Yes. The air density changes rapidly depending on whether or not that slice of air was in the shadow of a building lengthening the path and attenuating the pressure change and it's rate of change.

This is a good article about the physics of the explosion: https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-...

I worked in the fertilizer business and my company sold ammonium nitrate to farmers, mostly for use on potatoes. You need to use extreme care with this fertilizer.

No one could purchase it (even before Oklahoma City) without us knowing them. After Oklahoma City some TV stations in Grand Rapids sent reporters undercover trying to make purchases and they failed.

You need either dynamite or a substantial amount of heat to cause ammonium nitrate to explode. My boss tried to create a farm pond with it and his initial attempt failed. He failed to use enough dynamite ;<).

Personally I'd nominate the Beirut Port Authority for a Darwin award. Without the fireworks being stored in the building the welders sparks wouldn't have caused the explosion.

> the port sent a team of Syrian workers to fix the warehouse

Welder's nationality doesn't seem to me a relevant info to be included in a postmortem.

We haven’t been told the race of the person who ordered the welding, the race of the judge who ordered that the nitrate stay on the port, the race of the people who put fireworks next to thousands of tons of highly explosive material in a dense city, etc...

Someone is trying to make Syrian refugees into Girardian black sheep. This wouldn't be the first time. The irony is that Bashar Al Assad used nitrate-filled barrel bombs to decimate the Syrian people, and he is supported by Hezbollah and Iran, which have a huge influence in Lebanon. Their influence cannot be separated from the incompetence and corruption that led to the blast.

Here's the really crazy part: some people are saying that a lot of the nitrate which was originally stored must have been smuggled out, because otherwise the blast would have been larger. If true, it wouldn't be surprising that the nitrate was smuggled for Assad to use in barrel bombs.

Here's a list of barrel bombs dropped by the Syrian Air Force. That's a lot of nitrate...: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Syrian_Civil_War_barre...

just a correction Syrian is not a race Lebanese and Syrians or Jordanians are all arabs but you find different beleafe groups there, christians muslims (Shia and sunni and...) and more but most of them are Arabs if not all

The idea is to attach it to the correct group that the report authors (or the news outlet) want to have this blamed on. It’s a great political tool.

Literally everything in some societies is part of the larger game. We are not immune in the west either, unfortunately.

Welders next to fireworks next to ammonium nitrate

That is one definition of tertiary explosive, set off by secondary explosive, set off by primary flame source...

Ouch. I've done shipyard work. A lot of care was taken (on average) to ensure sparks and castoff didn't affect adjacent work even a couple of feet away. Causing a chain reaction in a warehouse? Damn.

Reads like a cartoon to me.

I think the main issue here is: budget.

Lebanon is in severe economic crisis. And that effects everything, especially government spending.

You say, "a demo expert should oversee storage of these stuff appropriately", well that means hiring an expert. Or "use a professional repair crew"; that means protective gear, removal of explosives around, special cold-welding equipment; and all these require budget.

Hiring 2 immigrant welders for a week = 200 dollars (and I’m being extremely generous here). Versus taking all the security measures and use protective gear to do things right = 20.000 dollars.

I believe there are more and more bad things on the way for Lebanon. A major electricity outage, or a leak in a chemical plant, or a bridge collapsing... All due to maintenance problems, might be just around the corner.

AN has been stored since 2013, economic crisis hit in late 2019. 20,000 dollars is nothing for the port authority, and the cost of storing the 2755 tons of AN in prime commercial real estate (Beirut port) is much higher to the cost of disposing it. The issue is corruption, ignorance, apathy, lack of good governance.

Who organizes these welders?

Whose job is it to check the site come up with a safe plan where / before the welders work?

Maybe the welders should have known better, but there needs to be more between total disaster and welding than just some guys with welding tools who probably have little power to say no without consequences ...

>Who organizes these welders?

>Whose job is it to check the site come up with a safe plan where / before the welders work?

Nobody does any of that. It's not a rich country. They simply can't afford that kind of overhead. Sure the welders could but they can't/won't do that if the rest of the economy/society normalizes it and normalizing that and the whole economy can't afford that. It sucks but that's just how it works. You gotta get rich before you can afford to care about worker safety and the environment. (Obviously it's not a hard cutoff, as you get richer you care more about each).

Imagine the state of workplace safety in the US but in the 1950s. That's where they are right now.

Welding without sufficient care can cause a lot of trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Boston_Brownstone_fire I hadn't seen a fire go to 9 alarms before this one.

Really the welding was the thing that matters least in this case. The environment that was created was so incredibly dangerous, so incredibly negligent that practically anything involving a spark would have caused this incident.

Fireworks near AN? Why not play Russian roulette with a single shot.

Storing AN for 6 years? Madness.

When storing 2,750 tons of AN inappropriately near other flammable materials, the question isn’t “why did it explode”, the question is “why didn’t it explode for 6 years?”

This was bound to be the outcome eventually until someone got around to actually storing that stuff correctly. It seems a small batch of welders just finally drew the short straw.

It seems silly to blame the spark, rather than the fuel.

If there was a massive, undetected gas-leak that erupts into a fireball when a guy strikes a match, you don't blame the guy for the damage.

Yeah, but if there was a massive dry fuel load in the California mountains caused by a hundred years of poorly informed forest management strategy, and some hypothetical electrical utility sparked & burned it all down, then you do blame the spark!

So what? The welders are an utterly inconsequential distraction from much more important lines of inquiry.

wet canvas curtains and dropsheets are a must when i weld, even over a concrete pad

I think many people are picturing the firework fuse getting ignited by a spark. But it seems more plausible that the packaging/box caught fire igniting the fireworks inside. Perhaps the packing/boxes obscured the contents of the boxes.

>Sparks from [the repair team's] welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

Oh wow, I was wondering what the white-ish sparkles were just prior to the explosion. It was the fireworks cache going off, which then ignited the 2750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate.

That's an immense amount of Ammonium Nitrate. I suspect one outcome of this will be a new ordinance/law will that disallow such large caches of explosive material from being stored in the same place. Rather it will have to be divvied up and distributed to holding facilities out of blast range of each other.

I’m having a hard time evaluating the credibility of this article. They mention “multiple sources,” but I can’t find any references. Can anyone find anything that vouches for the credibility of this report?

Maybe the source(s) want to remain confidential?

Possibly, but I’m surprised that this is the publication they’d choose to disclose such high-value information to.

One thing I haven't heard about yet: who was paying for all that prime warehouse storage space all these years?

Archives :

https://archive.is/vSiKi

and

https://web.archive.org/web/20200814174018/https://www.marit...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

Can someone explain the “heat wave”-like distortion that the camera briefly experiences well before the blast wave seems to reach the building. How could an atmospheric effect make it to the camera at two different speeds?

Not to be callous to the incredible tragedy at play, but I simply find this video to be mesmerizing in its quality and potency.

In America we’re born and raised on countless explosions in pop culture whether it’s a Hollywood or gaming. They’re to the point of being so utterly mundane that it’s rare for Hollywood to wow an audience with a mere explosion anymore (though I could certainly name some memorable ones from over the years). We all now think we know what they look like in urban environments, and have for the last 30 years of high quality special effects. But. This video is real. And the details and nuances at play have simply never been depicted in film or tv before. To see the physics at play is simply mind boggling to me. I’d love to read a frame by frame account by a true expert of this 4K video.

I'm not sure which video you're referring to, but there are several things at play that can cause visual effects like you described.

1) The seismic wave travels through the ground much faster than the shockwave in the air, and will rattle the camera. Cameras with anti-shake technology will try to compensate, often badly, resulting in smeared or blurred images.

2) The visible expanding shell of vapor is not the shockwave, it is caused by condensation in the low pressure zone behind the shockwave. The shockwave itself is harder to see, but it is still visible as a distortion or slight blurring.

There's something I don't get in this story.

Based on Wikipedia/Aljazeera:

  Customs officials had sent letters to judges requesting a resolution to the issu
  e of the confiscated cargo, proposing that the ammonium nitrate be either export
  ed, given to the army, or sold to the private Lebanese Explosives Company. Lette
  rs had been sent on [...]. One of the letters sent in 2016 noted that judges had
  not replied to previous requests

Have the authorities been so indolent that they avoided "doing some paperwork", and indirectly causing a catastrophe, or the proposal of selling the material was not realistic?

I ran across the image in this tweet of work being done on the door to the warehouse a couple hours after the blast. I presumed there was welding going on and this set off the fireworks which led to the blast. It amazes me how much information can be gathered in such a short time compared to just twenty years ago. The internet is wonderful. https://twitter.com/IntelCrab/status/1290782284686266372

The repairs in the image are probably not the repair that caused the blast. That was my thought process though.

> a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

Wow.

welding next to fireworks which is next to ammonium

The reason that ship came to Beirut after all is very weird, there is reportedly a mysterious businessman who pretended that there was another shipment going to Jordan, that the ship could pick up on its way that would the ship owner who was unable to pay its crew, to get some money, but it turned out it was a ploy to lure the ship and take its AN shipment as a compensation for an old debt between that mystery businessman with the owner according to the marine agent.

It's incredible that 4Chan had a thread with pictures of a 3 men working on doors to the warehouse. They were welding them.

This was within 24 hours of the explosion. Was going to post it here but then don't really think this board would appreciate 4chan threads...

Picture...

https://i.4pcdn.org/pol/1596600309252.jpg

Reblog of original Reuters article from three days ago: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-do...

Wow, welding next to a firework cache stored next to highly explosive chemicals, a situation known about for years. There's really no need to appeal to the swiss cheese model here. This was not a series of otherwise low-risk events that came together at the wrong time. This was... I don't know, something like the opposite of that.

HN's hive mind will never get it but if it interests you here's a great write up of how this happened in Texas, deals with some of the government processes and creep too -

https://youtu.be/pdDuHxwD5R4

CBS is a great resource that should be shown in high schools.

Scarey that a judge ordered the detention of this material and kept it and kept it in a populated area for years despite multiple regular objections...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosions

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Beirut_explosions

Interesting history on why there explosives were stored in the port in the first place...

Right up there with "checking if there's a gas leak with a candle".

There once was a gas-man named Peter

On a dark night, asearch for the meter

Touched a leak with his light

He arose out of sight

And as anyone can tell by reading this, he also completely destroyed the meter.

I love the description, welders working over a pile of fireworks stored next to a ginormous pile of Ammonium Nitrate.

So in many ways it really was a bomb, but one constructed by circumstance rather than intent.

I noted the maintenance connection in a CNN article about a week ago on HN [1]. This “report” seems to skip the fire stage and the reports that fire fighters were on site and noted the oddity of the fire.

> Maintenance was conducted on the warehouse door just hours before the blast on Tuesday, he added.

This looks like a key piece of evidence. Warehouse door maintenance could have caused the fire seen at the start of the videos of the incident.

Until more evidence is revealed I think “warehouse with 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire” is a good hypothesis.

Coulda, shoulda, and speculating about motivations can come later.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069640

I call bad attempt at cover-up. The government is trying to redirect the anger to "welders" because there is growing anger towards the ruling class.

Hezbollah does a pretty good job of staying out of the line of fire; even though I am sure they have helped themselves to some of the AN from time to time.

They store a pile of fireworks next to 2700 tons of explosive materials, then they send in people to make sparks right next to the fireworks.

Seems like hot work causes lots of accidents.

https://youtu.be/zWkcuR0adeI

I would say, hot work reveals unsafe situations.

Unsafe situations cause lots of accidents.

This story stinks because;

-1- When you try to "weld" AN, it deflagrates at best.

-2- There where 2 explosions to be heard and seen. First subsonic, followed by a supersonic one relatively much later. |

-3-In order to detonate, not deflagrate AN, it needs to build up pressure.

-4- When either a fireworks or AN storage facility is on fire; the first thing you do did not happen.

-5- The explosion radius does not correspond to the presented narrative.

-6- The measured earthquake does not correspond to the presented narrative.

I can't tell you what did happen, but I can say we're all eating bullshit.

> "May God protect Lebanon"

Well there's your problem mr. government official. You thought God was going to do your job for you.

"Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache."

Huh..

This news article reminds me of the beginning of the book "Mostly Harmless" by Douglas Adams.

"I am not responsible!"

I'm hearing this a lot from multiple so called "leaders".

Seriously? They were welding next to fireworks and explosives.

Oh boy

Who stores fireworks next to ammonium nitrate?

473 comments, 0 mentions of Rafic Hariri or Hezbollah. HN, I really had higher expectations.

Does this make a case for pro-Federal-Government? What would a libertarian say about how a society would prevent these types of accidents?

> Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.

Wait. What?

Incompetence should never lead to a city exploding.

Whose whats when where why so much nitrite?

Ars Technica has an article [1] with some answers.

1 - https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/ripped-chemical-bags...

https://asiatimes.com/2020/08/who-profits-from-the-beirut-bl... an alternative perspective which has a level of detail and questions that has been missing from western media but is arguably from a hostile source

non paywall link https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-profits-beirut-blast/57206...

Doesn't really say anything useful.

It is just bringing up that various hostile parties could have known about the ammonium nitrate being there and had motivation to blow it up.

Which yeah duh. But having the motivation and the means to do something is not evidence that you did it.

The actual evidence completely lines up with the original post. Not to say we shouldn't consider the conspiracy theories just that this one like the others isn't supported by the evidence.

I downvoted you because the article you link is basically insane conspiratorializing, based on the non-paywall link in the sibling comment.

It doesn't even keep the conspiracy theories straight:

* It was a plot by Russia to give explosives to Syria in a roundabout way [but it sits in Beirut for years despite being nominally in the hands of the people who are supposed to be delivering it?]

* Israel blew it up with a secret missile/bomb/weapon thinking it was a Hezbollah weapons cache and only realized their mistake after too much went up [because hyper-competent spy agency somehow decides that the best way to take out a large amount of explosive that dominates the list of largest non-nuclear explosions is to blow it up, or maybe they somehow did the intel figuring there was a large weapons cache but couldn't figure out what it was?]

* It's a US-France-Saudi conspiracy to seize control of the Lebanese economy and destroy the Chinese Belt-and-Road Initiative [that last bit comes out of nowhere actually].

Happy to be downvoted on HN! I agree there is much conjecture and projections in the article but it does provide various facts about the peculiar route the materials took to get to Beirut, lots of other questions about lack of bureaucratic oversight etc etc...

I do feel there is a dangerous trend towards labelling investigative journalism as 'conspiracy theories' and 'insane'. Facts are always interesting, ideas about them often less so.

That article seems to be a weird mish-mash of 3-5 contradictory conspiracy theories. It rants a good long while about how various forces in various countries want to take control of Lebanon etc through various means. Okay maybe it's true that they would want to do that, but how are any of these forces responsible for the local authorities keeping thousands of tons of explosives in a port warehouse for years, and then deciding to store some fireworks in there too, and then having somebody try to weld on the door of that warehouse?

I mean, I don't even say "conspiracy theory" in a hostile way. It's not impossible that one of those is actually true. But if we're supposed to be convinced of any of them, how about if they at least pick one and stick to it, and then maybe provide something more solid than wild speculation about how/why it would have happened in that particular way? A few vague tweets by the Israeli PM that could mean pretty much anything doesn't prove much, nor does a claim by a source based in a country hostile to the US to have seen multiple US reconnaissance planes of an unspecified type in the area at some unspecified time and location and means of detection.

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