SHELL-SHOCKED: Dramatic video shows a bride in Beirut shooting wedding photos when thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in Lebanon's capital Tuesday, with at least 100 dead, thousands injured and homeless and a desperate search for survivors. https://t.co/HlYnbUi32J pic.twitter.com/MaI1hTaYgU
— World News Tonight (@ABCWorldNews) August 5, 2020
Tons of dangerously explosive material left to rot, in close proximity to the city’s main grain storage and the one entry port for essential supplies, after being impounded from a Macedonian vessel of uncertain ownership, while the civil servants responsible for oversight passed the buck… Astonishing interactive report from BBC World News, “The Inferno and the Mystery Ship”:
… It had started with a fire in the port. Even now it’s not clear the precise time the blaze started.
But by 17:54 local time, a tweet from a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times showed the smoke billowing into the sky.
What followed has been shown in a series of videos posted on social media. There is an initial explosion which throws denser, darker smoke and debris into the air.
A series of flashes can be seen, almost like fireworks going off. An intense area of flame can be seen at the base of the smoke.
Then, 35 seconds after the first blast, there is a second, massive explosion. A huge column of red/brown smoke goes up and a white dome-like cloud follows the blast out.
Scores dead. Thousands injured. The heart of a city destroyed.
And at the centre of it, a warehouse full of nearly 3,000 tonnes of a chemical used for explosive. Ammonium nitrate…
Just a reminder that a fifth of Lebanon's total population are refugees. A small country collapsing under a series of calamities is coping with more than any current Western society could imagine. https://t.co/BUukoCoWEj
— Ishaan Tharoor (@ishaantharoor) August 4, 2020
To add: Local wheat production only covers about 10% of Lebanese consumption. The remainder is imported – principally from Russia. Almost all imported grain (80%+) enters trough that single terminal at the heart of the explosion. Utter disaster. The gov will have to move quick. https://t.co/ch7ofnIqk0
— Tobias Schneider (@tobiaschneider) August 4, 2020
Thank Murphy the Trickster God, America is a big rich sprawling country with a (steadily decreasing) excess supply capacity, and plenty of room to memory-hole the occasional industrial “accident”…
The devastating Beirut explosion was caused by ammonium nitrate.
A similar 2013 explosion in West, TX led to the Obama admin installing new safety requirements to prevent future ammonium nitrate tragedies.
The Trump admin reversed them in 2019.@joellooperhttps://t.co/j2uuTP0x44— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) August 5, 2020
RepubAnon
The explosions in West Texas and Beirut only go to show how well the free market protects the public from hazardous situations… not at all.
trollhattan
Anybody curious to learn more should see the BBC piece AL links above. The aerial before/after gizmo shows mindboggling destruction very effectively.
Have been hearing that international aid it being steered to in-country NGOs directly because it’s presumed Lebanese government officials will simply skim it and not distribute it. Lebanon is quite a mess.
Yay for Trump dialing back control of ammonium nitrate storage. What could possibly (boom) go wrong? Rick Perry must have smiled at that.
joel hanes
It WAS fireworks going off. This was reported in the first hours.
Lapassionara
@RepubAnon: how can anyone read any US history and think the free market solves anything is beyond me.
Bex
RIP Brent Scowcroft. He was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right about W’s Iraq war.
mrmoshpotato
@Lapassionara: Silly Lapassionara. Deregulation and tax cuts fix everything!
Mary G
The sight of the mountain of wheat spilling out of the demolished side of the granary was gobsmacking. Macron flew down there to witness, console, and promise help. I’m so old I remember when America had a president like that.
Roger Moore
@Lapassionara:
They disagree about what problems need solving. If you think the problem is capitalists not having free rein, the free market is obviously the solution to all our problems.
Raoul
This Admin is just recklessness, top to bottom. It will take a decade to dig our way out … if our political system isn’t too tattered, and the will of our people not too broken. Absolute fuckwittery, and mounting evidence that we’re a failed state (or actively failing, anyway).
We have to win elections at every level and expunge these corrupt, venal morons.
Amir Khalid
I saw a TV interview the bride did; Israa Seblani is a Lebanese-American doctor. She had to go back to Lebanon to get married because her fiancé was still waiting for a US visa three years after he applied.
Ruckus
@Lapassionara:
The totally free market does solve several issues.
Solves them very badly for the most number of people but if your goal is to vastly enrichen the few, and fuck the rest, then yes the totally free market solves “problems.”
People are selfish and have a built in need for self preservation. In a modern society that has increased production massively per person it is less necessary to harm others to survive, in fact it’s better to join together and survive in a more equitable fashion. But the truly selfish, the hoarders, destroy the common cause of survival in a quest to hoard wealth, as a measurement of their value to the overall process of humanity. And in the long run their hoarding almost always destroys far more than it builds. There will never be total equality in the hoarding but more equality, helps far more than having a very few with an overabundance of whatever. In modern society the major effect of hoarding is monetary, where a relative few have dramatically too much and a massive number have none. The world becomes out of balance and at some point, warfare seems like the only option. The hoarders always think that their actions protect them, but they never do. The world actually likes a system to be closer to balance, although in any system as big as the world a true balance can never be reached.
Elizabelle
@Bex: Agreed. Brent Scowcroft was a good man. He knew when to say when, with the 1991 Persian Gulf War. He was tight with GHW Bush.
And then W and company froze him out. Creating their own reality, they said.
trollhattan
@joel hanes:
IDK if it’s been verified as fireworks or ammunition, but the pre-giant boom video clearly shows something being set off rapidly in the initial fire.
Elizabelle
@Mary G: I know. Lebanon is already facing a food shortage, and to see all that wheat and other grains, ruined.
Vote Biden so that the United States can send some useful aid Lebanon’s way.
WRT directly funding NGOs, so grifters in government don’t skim off the top: that is where Trump and his ilk would take us. Corruption. Self-dealing. No concern for the public, beyond retaining power.
Amir Khalid
@Lapassionara:
You can’t count on an amoral institution like the free market to solve problems. It exists to profit from problems — maybe by solving them, but not necessarily. Very often the free market finds it more easily profitable to let a problem go on, or even make it worse.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle:
One positive of the destroyed grain elevator is it had to have deflected some of the shockwave that would otherwise have traveled in that particular direction. Hard to imagine the damage could have been worse than it was, but it seems plausible.
For a country already in process of collapsing before the explosion it’s hard to imagine any of the needed rebuilding actually occurring. Those who can afford to will probably just leave.
Brachiator
I saw that wedding video earlier, and was glad to see that the people there appeared to get away relatively unharmed.
Lebanon has bigger problems than de-regulation.
Here in the US, right wing dogma always comes down to “my profits are more important than your life.”
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Whatever can be profited from.
Hazardous chemicals without reasonable protections, who cares if a river catches on fire or a city explodes? Oxycodone, so what if it’s highly addictive and destroys lives, there’s money to be made! The list goes on and on and on.
cain
@trollhattan:
From everything I’ve read so far – it seems that there was a lot of buck passing – the folks at the port knew the danger and reported but the govt did nothing.
Lebanonese govt failed their people. Their system of govt needs to change – it’s hard now because in desperate times, corruption will happen at the systemic level due to self preservation.
A care taker govt consisting of people of similar cultural background could help here, and help direct money and resources in a way that help.. could be the solution.
Gvg
@Ruckus: I remember when the flaws of socialism were more front and center. Communism was really seriously fucked up. Aside from the corruption (same as we are currently seeing in our capitalism) was the stupid arrogance that something as big as a countries economy could be planned. They could never foresee enough of what the future was to even sort of get it right. It was a variation of always planning to fight the last war. Then there was ideology when the facts didn’t agree, the facts must be wrong. Sound familiar? Communism collapsed and we don’t have that reminder any more.
Capitalism is useful for many things. But worshiping it is stupid. It’s a tool. Use it when it benefits us. Fetishize it, and you become a cult worshipper self made slave. Everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer. We actually have multiple tools and some work better in some situations than others. For one thing, IMO anything that needs impartial fairness like courts, prisons, police should never ever be privatized. Capitalism works most beneficially when tamed not allowed to be wild. The courts and our laws have back slid a lot from the lessons of the anti trust era and the Great Depression bank failures. Corruption is a real problem allowed because of sneaky budget cuts in things like IRS audit divisions and other regulators. People have been propagandized into not knowing they were the real beneficiaries of regulations and tax cuts on the wealthy haves really lead to lower wages for the rest of us.
i am not attracted to socialism. I want a smarter capitalism. A hybrid that remembers its people that matter not slogans or ideaology.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Not just in the US, all of humanity. Yes there are people everywhere who understand but in the last 100-200 yrs (OK probably a lot longer) the effect of money as means unto itself rather than a means of trade has caused more damage than ever. An example, vlad is one of the worlds wealthiest, in a country that at one point in the not too distant past, played the card of total equality, even as they never came close in practicing it.
Just Chuck
@Gvg: I think of socialism as a check and balance against capitalism. You need both in proper proportion.
Ruckus
@Gvg:
Yes.
The reason that the wealthy want private ownership of the entities of what we consider government is that they stand a much better chance of hoarding more money. Less control, control that can be bought, controlled by them directly, etc, control that is that in name only, allows them to gather more wealth. What good comes to a world with people like Jeff Bezos, whose claim to fame and wealth is that he sells more crap to more people by use of communication rather than bricks assembled into structures? How often does that actually improve the world?
The New York Crank
@trollhattan: And if something does go wrong, Trump will be out there 15 minutes later saying that it’s either Hillary’s fault or Obama’s fault — or that it was what it was.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crannk
greenergood
Beirut explosion the day before the 75th anniversary of Hiroshima – the video of the Beirut conflagration reminded me of US nuclear test films from Bikini Atoll etc – so many people using their phone cams to record a fire, only to be knocked off their feet by the devastating blast wave. Any aid from America yet? Will be amazed if there is.
Elizabelle
@The New York Crank: But who gives a fuck what Trump says? He is a known imbecile. I tire of us amplifying “oh look what we imagine the rightwing will say — ouch!” Not just you, Crank. It is endemic here.
Follow Nancy Pelosi’s strategy. Contain him and work around him.
VOTE VOTE VOTE
ETA: And I hope that Letitia James’ strategy is indict and incarcerate. A lot of grifters from the Trump Organization.
RepubAnon
@Lapassionara: Well, it can help with overpopulation concerns. Deaths from poisonous food additives, improper sanitation, fake medicines, massive pollution, … all made easier by an unregulated free market.
Ruckus
@Just Chuck:
Some of the point is what is the right proportion? As is obvious, neither is good when unfettered by the other. And yet without controls and actual equality of the people we get chaos. Our country attempts to sidestep the issue but we see that money has won out. The stock market reins supreme in the monetary world because it is really purely about money, making/hoarding more of it as an entity of it’s own, rather than a means of trade, work and survival. The market crashed once before because it was uncontrolled but now it somewhat is so what crashes is the population and the structure around it, because the checks and balances on that strictly monetary gain have eroded. 75 yrs ago we taxed high wealth at a far greater rate but that wealth was used to purchase the controls so that taxation could be lowered. Now we tax high wealth at a lessor rate than many of the people that work for the wealthy. Notice that we still had hugely wealthy and poor people, we just kept some control on the huge inequality of wealth as it’s own means. We no longer do that and we are suffering for it. And now that we have a complete and utter moron in “charge,” who thinks only in terms of money and how much he can get for the least amount of anything – nothing else, the disaster is rapidly growing.
mrmoshpotato
@RepubAnon:
I wonder if what you’re listing there would qualify as genocide.
RepubAnon
@Just Chuck: Econ 101 students learn bout market externalities, and the need for government regulation to avoid problems such as pollution, untested medicines, etc.
Would anyone want to carry a chemical analysis kit to see whether there was, say, gypsum in one’s peppermint candies – or arsenic? (1858 Bradford sweets poisoning). Government regulation is a Goldilocks problem: it has to be just right.
RepubAnon
@mrmoshpotato: It wouldn’t be targeted to a specific ethnic or religious group, so probably not genocide. I’d go with “murder through the dictates of an abandoned and malignant heart.”
mrmoshpotato
@RepubAnon: Negligent mass homicide?
Omnes Omnibus
@RepubAnon: Americans aren’t a group?
Doug R
I hear the Canadians have already committed to $5,000,000 in aid immediately.
Interstadial
Not exactly. The first and second “explosions” (the ones that produced the white and then red smoke clouds), were deflagrations, subsonic rapid combustions that in colloquial (but not technical) usage would be called explosions. That’s not what caused the smooth white cloud that briefly appeared, or the terrible loss of life and devastating damage.
Moments after the second deflagration, the bulk of the material exploded in a detonation, a true explosion that produces an initially supersonic shock wave which slows down to the speed of sound at some point. That shock wave started within the base of the red cloud and rapidly passed through it in all directions to the atmosphere beyond, creating the temporary dome-shaped condensation cloud. In some freeze frames (depending on perspective) you can also see a white semicircle on the water which shows the limit of the shock wave (and the sound of the detonation) at that moment. The invisible shock wave ahead of the condensation cloud, and the structural collapses and flying debris associated with it, are what caused the widespread deaths and damage.
So there were actually three “explosions” in colloquial terms, the first two being merely rapid combustions that produced large smoke clouds and proximate damage, and the third being a detonation that produced a tremendous shock wave and widespread death and destruction.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
Actually, it improves the world a great deal. Amazon has been absolutely essential in getting goods to people who could not leave their homes during the lockdown. It is right to condemn Bezos for the way he treats his employees, but this should not get in the way of acknowledging how efficient and essential online shopping has become.
Here in the US, right wing dogma always comes down to “my profits are more important than your life.”
True, this is a human problem. But again, in the US, the justification of rapacious capitalist greed has risen to the level of religious dogma. Look at how shrill Trump has become by asserting that if you don’t love capitalism then you must not love the Baby Jesus.
James E Powell
@Elizabelle:
With our press/media, Republicans who criticize Republicans are frozen out. Democrats who criticize Democrats get permanent guest spots on the cable and Sunday shows.
Geminid
I hope the there is a new Administration and Congress that will take a hard look at Amazon’s business practices, because I think it is pushing the antitrust envelope in its dealings with competitors, vendors and customers. And I hope a new administration and Congress will also tilt the general balance of power away from ownership and towards workers, and that the Teamsters and the S.E.I.U can unionize the warehouses and delivery fleets. If these things happen, Amazon will still be a flourishing business, but we would all be better off. In the long run, Amazon would probably be better off too, since it tends to thrive on prosperity.
Robert Sneddon
@Geminid: Amazon was a first-mover business that grasped what the internet could do for it and grew up with it and they did stuff that no new interloper can do today because the internet-connected populace has matured, there isn’t a gap for the new guys to get a start and do what Amazon does because they can’t do it cheaper. I’m not sure breaking up Amazon under anti-trust legislation will play, it’s not like he’s part of a shadowy cabal of company bosses who conspire to smack down brash young upstarts like the original trusts that did that sort of thing.
For over a decade Amazon made losses year on year, big losses that were made up by investors throwing money into what looked from the outside like a financial black hole. The genius of Bezos was that he prioritised growth over everything else, reinvesting the money Amazon made in new facilities and new products, new ways of doing things and always, always driving costs down. The result is that Amazon is THE online delivery company in many countries but it’s also a giant in cloud computing because it threw money into Amazon Web Services (AWS) because it needed big data centre operations to support the retail side of things and, hey, with the internet they could rent out spare capacity and hey, folks want more of this cloud so we’ll build more of it and…
When it was raining money, Bezos was out there holding a bucket while a lot of his erstwhile competition (outpost.com anyone?) were performing one-and-a-half gainers off the high board into a dry pool. It’s easy now to say he was doing it wrong but the evidence is on his side.
Geminid
@Robert Sneddon: Bezos definitely made a success of a strategy of prioritizing growth in market share over profit margin, and investors backed that strategy to their own benefit. I don’t think Amazon has to be broken up, just made to comply with antitrust rules regarding unfair competitive practices. And unionization of its workers is needed, because right now Amazon has taken the lead in the race to the bottom that has impoverished and run ragged hard working Americans the last forty years. Amazon does this because it can, not because it serves their long term interests, much less those of the public in general.
Brachiator
@Robert Sneddon:
Also, breaking up Amazon benefits Walmart and Target, not some mythical upstart online company.
chopper
@Interstadial:
well thank god that’s cleared up.