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Comment by zxcmx | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever thought about your house? The whole damn thing is fuel.

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.

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> Have you ever thought about your house? The whole damn thing is fuel.

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.

Yes, you're right. They deeply failed as a port authority and a warehouse.

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.

I think they were restricted in what they could do. There were repeated reports of danger, and they even asked the army to store the AN. I think the failure was higher than warehouse and port authority; they correctly assessed and reported the risk, but no action was taken.

on a personal basis most people are surrounded by fuel and don't think about it at all.

That is because we have safety standards that are explicitly designed to address those risks.

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