> 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.
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.