The ship on its side to the north of the blast -- I wonder what kind of damage was able to cause that? (i.e. the ship not be able to roll back upright? Seeing footage elsewhere, rolling even to the point of ~45-60 deg is not fatal to an oceangoing container ship)
Windows blown out, then force of the overpressure rolling it on its side, then filling with water? Or unsecured load (being in port) shifting and sinking?
Separately, about the chemicals -- at some point, over 6 years, doesn't someone just say, I'm moving this life threatening shit out of here, go ahead and arrest me? After the Tianjin disaster, wouldn't someone have thought of that, you would think?
The ship is a cruise ship, the Orient Queen. Shout out to the brilliant Marine Traffic app where I found this first, but it's also written about on some industry websites.
The consensus seems to be that that the hull was damaged and water flooded the ship on one side, causing it to list and then sink.
> After the Tianjin disaster, wouldn't someone have thought of that, you would think?
There's a string of similar disasters reaching back about a century, and unfortunately not everyone seems to take note. There was a big one in Texas just two years before the Tianjin one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
Never underestimate the power of bureaucratic paralysis... From all news reports it's looking like the persons responsible for the port repeatedly pleaded with the Lebanese court authorities to get it out of there, and nothing was ever done.
I honestly have no idea how admiralty law works in a Lebanese legal context. In the US or Canada if a ship is abandoned in port there's well defined legal mechanisms for the port authority to seize it and its cargo for unpaid fuel and moorage fees, and summon the owners to court to defend their asset.
The owner is a Russian Cypriot who abdicated responsibility. They weren't able to locate him.
Four crew members of the vessel got stranded onboard for a whole year while the issue was being resolved. They were not allowed to disembark nor return home.
Afterwards this stuff was improperly stored in a warehouse for six years. There's lots of corruption and incompetence at every stage of this.
The twist not in the news is the alternative uses this substance has and what else was incompetently stored in the vicinity. It really isn't a big mystery why so many tons of it were left for such a long time in that port.
Seems like for a hazardous commodity like ammonium nitrite after some reasonable period of time the port authorities should be able sell it and put the money in escrow.
Not clear what the "red mercury" article has to do with the Beirut incident, but fortunately, it turned out to be either a hoax, a fraud, an intelligence-agency sting of some kind, or just plain kookery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
> ... at some point, over 6 years, doesn't someone just say ...
A very small comfort indeed, but now that it's in the public attention expect every other port around the world to quickly review and relocate any ersatz munitions on their docks.
Newcastle, Australia has a port facility storing between 6,000 and 12,000 tons of AN close to residential areas. Unfortunately despite calls for it to reduce the stockpile or move it elsewhere, it seems not much is being done.
"Storing" needs some context here I think. It's a factory producing 385kt of AN a year, so 6-12kt is approx a week's worth of production. I don't really see how you can avoid needing that kind of buffer storage at that scale, and by all reports they're following strict safety standards.
That said, that makes the real question why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.
Finally my military experience is relevant. If you've ever wondered why military ammo depots rarely blow up despite plenty of accidents and fires (at least in western cultures or specifically in the USA), a long time ago I was an Army sysadmin for a computer system devoted to keeping that safe. This wasn't a centralized control thing either, it was a distributed system.
There's a minimum contact diameter and maximum distance to propagate an explosion. Even if you detonate one pallet of one ton of ANFO literally making a checkerboard of pallets would seem from memory to be enough to make sure the explosion does not propagate to the other pallets. Now realize this was decades ago and I was more or less a sysadmin not a warrant officer nor one of the research scientists who wrote the books full of regulations nor the geospatial analysis code. Yes one pallet of one ton of ANFO would make a mess of the forklift driver next to it, but, maybe 100 or 200 hundred feet away, other than maybe some broken windows you'd be hard pressed to tell it happened.
One of many AN production processes generates about one part calcium carbonate (limestone, essentially) to one part AN, so you could literally alternate train cars of synthetic limestone with train car loads of AN.
Bulk storage is more problematic.
A pretty good analogy is forest fires. One tree chopped into segments and catches fire is a pretty cool bonfire or camp fire which is no big deal for outdoorsmen who intelligently plan ahead. You can do that a million nights in a row and nothing bad will happen. One million trees in close proximity and if one catches fire the whole forest burns down in one night, which is a huge problem.
> why such a hazardous site was allowed to be built so near people in the first place.
I don't know about this specific case, but the chronology is usually reversed. Someone gets a permit and builds a hazardous factory somewhere suitably close to a city that it has access to transportation and employees, but far enough to be safe, with adequate safety areas. Then, over time, the city needs more room and since the factory hasn't blown up yet, it seems safe enough to expand right up to it...
> by all reports they're following strict safety standards.
Orica has been fined for safety breaches in the past. But even if they are doing everything right, you need to consider the context: it's surrounded by a bunch of things that can catch fire.
There's a massive coal terminal, a fuel/petrol terminal, as well as a Fertiliser producer all within a few hundred meters of each other.
Any one of those having a bad day and Newcastle makes state news and everyone goes to watch the fire. (Like seemingly half the country did when the Pasha Bulker freighter beached right on Nobby's Beach, a few hundred meters away).
If that fire spreads, because say there's strong winds (also a common thing there) and now we have a risk of Orica's terminal going up.
Orica plant was commenced in 1969 -- I wonder what distance the nearest residential housing was to the site at the time.
I can understand residents not wanting to be within a potential blast radius, but I don't know enough to guess at who'd be responsible for the cost of relocating a manufacturing plant if there was council approval to extend suburban zoning ever closer to the plant over the years.
Same thing for the AZF disaster in Toulouse, France: when the plant was created it was in the middle of fields.
Fast forward in time and the surroundings of the plant became completely urbanized at the time of the explosion.
I remember my physics teacher talking about the AZF plant risk and urbanization circa 1990 so twenty years before the explosion (I'm from the Toulouse area), so everyone knew there too.
I have family that used to own property in Stockton well before the Stockton Bridge was built in 1971.
According to Wikipedia "Stockton was settled almost as soon as the foundation of Newcastle in 1797." -- so yeah, the Orica plant was definitely established well after people were living there. It's grown a bit since, but it's definitely still very much a 'beach town vibe'.
Then of course there's the whole City of Newcastle right across the harbour. While the 1989 earthquake definitely resulted in the city hollowing out, when the Orica plant was built it was a vibrant and well populated.
I'm about 130km north-west of Newcastle now, so relatively safe from any immediate effects.
In Sydney, under the Mascot (main international airport) flight paths, you've got people who purchased property in the last couple of decades insisting that curfew hours be increased, flight paths be changed, etc -- despite the airport operating for 80+ years, and at no time in the past century has anyone thought air travel would decrease in popularity (2020 notwithstanding).
I get that some people buy into areas expecting change / no change, but I'm very wary of people's causality inversion fields getting in the way of historical accuracy.
If Orica's been there for 51 years now, how many local residents turned up since they 1969 vs after 1969?
If you look at where the building holding the explosives was, it's a now filled with water and connected to the ocean.
I'm wondering if it was a tsunami that flipped the ship over? Haven't heard any reports of a tsunami, but you could imagine if that much dirt was blasted out into the water, it probably created a substantial wave.
yeah...was just wondering which port is ever going to seize and store chemicals like that now. Probably no one wanted to touch it and it just got stuck there.
Hezbollah is known to stockpile around this amount of explosives. One stockpile was discovered in London in 2015, and another was discovered in Germany.
Ammonium nitrate is a popular readily available ingredient for many militant groups that want to improvise a bomb. The Oklahoma City bomb was ammonium nitrate and diesel fuel or heavy fuel oil. Not like this is something exclusive to Hezbollah. In this particular case the instance of the ship and its cargo that were abandoned at the port in 2014 are well documented and no significant links to Hezbollah have been documented yet.
Anyways, if Hebzollah wanted the ammonium nitrate for their own use, surely they would have found a way some time in the past five years to remove it from the port in 1 to 5 ton quantities and store it somewhere in more rural areas outside of metro Beirut.
I mean, just the fact that this stuff was stored out in the open .. and 'everyone knew' it was there. That is just a major security risk.
Its not like Lebanon doesn't have enemies, who would have benefited greatly from this incident.
If it weren't so tragic, the stupidity would be hilarious. 2700+ tons of explosive material, parked right in the most strategic spot, in a city well known for having enemies ...
> Anyways, if Hebzollah wanted the ammonium nitrate for their own use, surely they would have found a way some time in the past five years to remove it
They did find a way -
"Lebanon's LBCI-TV reported on August 5 that, according to preliminary information, the fire that set off the explosion was started accidentally by welders who were closing off a gap that allowed unauthorized entry into the warehouse."
A Lebanese friend told me of a link. This explosion came 3 days before the UN tribunal's verdict on the murder of the former prime minister Hariri in 2005. "Everyone knows" the port is controlled by the Amal party, who is allied with Hezbollah. That party is led by Nabih Berri, who has been Speaker of Parliament since 1992, and who fought the formation of the tribunal in 2007. And anyway, just several hours ago, the UN has announced it is delaying its verdicts on the assassination trial until the 18th. We'll see how that goes.
Well, it could also just be an accident likely due to negligence/incompetence. The port probably wasn't run to the highest standards before the coronavirus, and the ongoing primary and secondary crises from that may have just been the final blow needed for something bad to happen.
Firstly, its a terrible explosive for actual military use. If you can pull strings on this scale, you can obtain something more practical.
If you are planning terrorist attacks, you don't need a mountain of the stuff, because there is no plausible scenario for using it in such quantities.
Secondly, if they had a plan to use it, they would have moved it somewhere sensible, and have it guarded / stored properly, they would make sure its not lost in a terrible accident.
Windows blown out, then force of the overpressure rolling it on its side, then filling with water? Or unsecured load (being in port) shifting and sinking?
Separately, about the chemicals -- at some point, over 6 years, doesn't someone just say, I'm moving this life threatening shit out of here, go ahead and arrest me? After the Tianjin disaster, wouldn't someone have thought of that, you would think?