If it were a fireworks depot, it wouldn’t be a secret. People could go to the Beirut phone book and I would expect the news to be like “Fire at the ACME Firewoks depot” by now.
It was a port warehouse. It likely housed all sorts of random things at different times.
2 Likes
Plenty of fireworks warehouse/factory disaster videos out there. The only question I would have is are fireworks valuable enough to take up prime warehouse space at a major port.
This wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen video of a fireworks storage place going boom.
The building wasn’t meant for long term use for any one purpose. It’s a dock warehouse where you leave the stuff offloaded from ships until it’s trucked out. I guess the reason the AN was there long term was due to a legal mess. Fireworks are certainly valuable enough to store short term to whatever extent Lebanon imports or exports fireworks.
A major port in a country with 50% unemployment with millions of refugees from a raging civil war in a country 50 miles away.
Is there a good pre-explosion picture of this area from this angle (i.e. from this side of the building in the middle).
CNN has satellite images with sliders to compare the before and after.
Doesn’t really matter one way or another. Having munitions there to ship to Syria might be worth lying about. Either way they had a bunch of small bombs stored near a really big bomb.
Odd. It’s doesn’t look as bad with the sliders.
I thought that at first, but I think it’s because the aerial view makes it look like buildings are still there when it’s basically just the footprint of the building that is still there.
2 Likes
That makes sense.
I can’t stop looking at all that grain from the silos. For a struggling city/country, to see so much food lost is a gut punch.
1 Like
Seems like the perfect environment for super lax safety regulations and that not being top of mind for anyone. Even if it was small arms munitions there’s no reason to think Israel would be behind it. I can easily imagine a shipping container of loose ammo being placed in a building next to a seized ammonium nitrate… and it still being basically the same story as the fireworks.
There was a big explosion of a fireworks factory in the Netherlands in 2000. Before the big explosion, you see fireworks going off quite prominently:
Lebanon is a net importer of food. I wonder how many people will go hungry due to supply lines being disrupted.
The Port of Beirut handles 60% of the country’s imports and a greater percentage of agricultural imports.
The silos serve as a strategic storage for Lebanon, with about 85% of the country’s cereals stored in the facility, according to trading company Mena Commodities.
However, it is believed the silos did not contain huge quantities of grain at the time of the explosion, as the country tried to meet a shortage of bread that surfaced recently due to the current financial crisis, the company said.
I did read, not sure where, that while 60% of the countrys grain goes through those silos they were relatively empty because of some other recent events (related to Covid I think - edit: due tofin crisis as per NotBruceZ post)
I look at those Silos and don’t really give a shit about the grain that’s actually in them. Grain is cheap. What isn’t cheap is not being able to unload ships with more grain in them. That’s going to cause people to choose between leaving and starving.
1 Like
Agreed - I wasn’t trying to imply everything is fine and dandy.
My friend was saying they were already in trouble before this with inflation and food prices doubling in the past couple months. This will only make that way worse.