I'm not the conspiratorial type, but it really does seem like there's some other information that we're not getting.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666950/
[1] http://news.mit.edu/2017/cells-combat-chromosome-imbalance-0...
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.
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.
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.
[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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ammonium_nitrate_disas...
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.
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.
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?
They'd use a local hazardous waste disposal company and 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.
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.