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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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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 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

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.

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.

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.

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

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