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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.

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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).

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.

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.

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 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)

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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."

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?

Now imagine the nuclear weapons the US holds...

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...

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