Maybe Jared can fix it?
Martyrs are the most inspirational figures.
Agree with this, but mainly the problem with cops is the same one as the problem with politicians - self selection bias.
These new videos make it hard to see how only 150 died!
Hard to believe the count isnât in the 1000âs.
Multiple sources have reported that the disastrous explosion at Port of Beirut was sparked by hot work at a warehouse where officials had stored 2,750 tonnes of confiscated ammonium nitrate and a cache of fireworks. In a new report, senior officials provided Reuters with additional details: early this year they had learned that one of the warehouseâs doors was broken, raising the risk that a malicious actor could steal dangerous explosives. The portâs welding contractors set off the cache while trying to repair the door to protect the cache.
According to the report, the security investigation that set this chain in motion began in January after the broken door and a large hole in the warehouseâs wall were discovered. On June 4 - six months later - state security forces ordered the port to guard the warehouse and make appropriate repairs. On August 4 - two months after the order - the port sent a team of Syrian workers to fix the warehouse. Sparks from their welding work ignited a supply of fireworks, which had been stored next to the ammonium nitrate cache.
Reuters reports that the prime minister and the president of Lebanon were informed of the security lapses at the site.
Holy fuck what a tragic comedy of errors. W/o the fireworks the nitrate would never go off from a few sparks right?
So this is how mistakes work.
Mistake 1 is usually not that bad. Costs a few hundred bucks to a few million bucks depending on the stakes, but rarely all that serious.
Mistake 2 is made after mistake 1 and it makes mistake 1 4-5x worse than it would have been. This now sucks, but itâs still just âI had a shitty weekâ bad.
Every single mistake after this point causes multiplicatively bigger problems, but at mistake 3 things can start to be career/life threatening.
This thing went to at least mistake 4-5 before it literally blew up a whole country. There is nothing more important than playing your A game after the first mistake has already been made. These are the things that you should be having trouble putting out of your mind when you go to sleep at night. Once things have already started to go wrong they can get progressively much worse very very quickly.
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Can you imagine being someone who worked in that port and knew what was stored there - watching the fireworks go off? Or being one of the supervisors the second you realize the welders caught the fireworks on fire? What would you do?
We know now that being behind the grain silo might be the safest place - but youâd have no way of knowing the grain silo would hold.
Is the water the safest place to be so at least you donât have to worry about stuff collapsing on you?
Imagine being one of the port workers and seeing your boss sprint past you in a blind panic.
You look for something sort of solid to hide behind or jump in the water. Then you spend the remaining time exploring your religious faith through bargaining. Then you find out if you were right or not basically every time.
Well you donât know how long itâs going to take for the fireworks to ignite the AN. So you may think you have time to run. I guess you just pick the direction that looks clearest and go.
Someone in HackerNews said they were 600M away and lived. Unfortunately what did they have, 40 seconds? Thatâs may not be enough time to get 100M away over industrial port terrain.
Yeah this is a good point. You just try to make it as far away from the explosion as possible and hope to get out of the kill radius I guess.
My stepdadâs grandfather was supposedly at the Texas City explosion in 1947. The story is he jumped off a big oil tank, broke his ankle, and still kept running.
But my stepdadâs SE Texas family is so full of tall tales I have no idea what is actually true.
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Yes no question being a political leader in Lebanon in the 21st century is a crazy making proposition. At the same time that was a self created problem over an unpaid bill or something. Do not impound 2500 tons of cheap explosives. That was the first mistake that created the rest. And once that first mistake got made it was just sitting there, a giant bomb, waiting for someone to eventually not pay enough attention to it and fuck up.
Once that shit is in your port you donât do anything else until youâve sold it to someone else and booked its shipment to that place. You have the customs documents so you probably know who to call in the receiving country. If you have to mark it stolen so that the previous owner can claim insurance (and pay you back for his port fees), and sell it under the table to the receiver for 25% of the agreed on price thatâs what you do. You get the fucking borderline nuclear bomb out of the goddamn port.
Hopefully Lebanon gets a political reset that is less of an impossible mess to govern in a competent way.
Iâll guarantee you that the person who made the decision to impound those explosives wasnât the person who was responsible for disposing of them. The person who was responsible for disposing of them was probably all wrong for the task, a rule follower with limited official power.
Itâs physically impossible to sustain being as afraid of that freight as is appropriate indefinitely. The longer it was there the longer it had been there without blowing up and the safer everyone felt. Then one day someone figured using fire near it was a risk worth taking. I mean think of the political ramifications of someone stealing that stuff and using it in a terrorist bombing!
Beirut blast: Painstakingly restored stained glass destroyed in seconds
Beirutâs historic landmarks had already survived 15 years of civil war, and many of them had their iconic stained glass restored by one artist.
Maya Husseini saw two decades of her work disappear in the aftermath of the massive blast at the port of Beirut which ravaged entire neighbourhoods of the city.
Now she is determined to restore it all over again
The reported death tolls seem so hard to believe.
This seems completely impossible, but rescuers have potentially found signs of life in the rubble. Today. One month after the explosion.
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