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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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