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