However, evidently some people (their affiliation is not clear to me) were aware of the major risks this caused and pleaded with the judiciary to do something about it, to no avail. I'm somewhat mystified as to who exactly it is that recklessly put the ammonium nitrate where it is, and I think that the desire to avoid blame here is strong enough (and the blame itself widespread enough) that a proper investigation will only end in stonewalling or scapegoating.
Some underpaid and undereducated laborers. Unfortunately, this society did not have sufficiently developed governance to force the proper storage of ammonium nitrate. There were multiple warnings issued over the years, and multiple mandates by the judicial system, but the political will to spend the money to move it did not exist, so it did not get moved.
If they paid a dozen guys double the minimum wage for Lebanon and it took a whole month, that would be about $10,000.
After all, the AN had been lying there without blowing up for years, so surely someone else is keeping tabs on that too.
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What I'm saying is that it's easy in hindsight to see how stupid a decision was, but to the actors at the time they were facing a much more complicated situation with less obvious tradeoffs.
Until we accept this, we will only have finger-pointing blame assigned and accidents will keep happening, because we'll just install new humans in the same flawed system that created the accident.
It's the usual mix of carelessness, lack of security guidelines, bureaucratic inertia and corruption. How hard would it really have been to rent a warehouse outside the city to store explosive and flammable material at?
I can totally imagine the same thing happening in an Indian port. Its mostly because of having a "dont worry, nothing will happen" attitude or even if someone from complained about the goods, getting the bureaucracy to do something is fast is almost impossible.
Do you store things in the attic? plastic tubs? How about the basement? cardboard? Do you have wool, paintings, plastic toys, plastic anything, wooden anything? Look around you and the places you keep things. Oh my god curtains they are more or less just flame conduits.
Your couches, your clothes, everything around you is fuel for a massive fire. It can be a bit scary when you really evaluate it. I bet you have never thought seriously about the risk before.
Admittedly at a city level, 3 kilotons of ammonium nitrate in a strategic location should definitely have set off some real thinking but on a personal basis most people are surrounded by fuel and don't think about it at all.
analogizing a house, the purpose of which is to store and house human occupants, ran by non-professionals, to a dock store-house that houses hazardous compounds and is staffed by employees is pretty useless.
Yes, most everything is fuel.
Storing large amounts of explosive chemicals is beyond the scope of purpose behind a household.
Dock storehouses routinely deal with hazardous/dangerous goods. They are built to do so with the premise that the staff that run them will follow strict (and in most cases clearly written) guidelines.
In other words : I don't need to demonstrate explosion-readiness as a strict rule before home ownership -- but most countries require groups that house and manipulate explosive or combustible goods to demonstrate both their skill in manipulation, and their disaster planning in the worst case.
I was trying to explain why civilian city leadership might not have good intuition for why the storage issue would be a problem for them.
That is because we have safety standards that are explicitly designed to address those risks.