Beirut Explosion

[swampyankee]

The recent explosion in Beirut is no longer news, but I think it's symptomatic of more than corruption, in that it's also the result of a growing tendency for government officials to ignore the advice of experts, especially when it involves some level of cost or it is ideologically or politically inconvenient. In this case, personnel had been warning the government for several years that storage of this quantity of ammonium nitrate was dangerous.

This sort of malfeasance isn't restricted to government entities, as there are a number of disasters due to poor storage or handling of ammonium nitrate in shipping and storage facilities (see The deadly history of ammonium nitrate, the explosive linked to the Beirut blast, Explosion of ammonium nitrate in a fertilizer plant - La référence du retour d'expérience sur accidents technologiques and West Fertilizer Explosion and Fire | CSB).

 

[Shortround6]

See the Texas City disaster.

 

[J4F-2]

This is a satellite image showing the damaged areas, it's mind numbing and heartbreaking at the same time. Each block represents an area of about 30 meters or 100 feet.

 

[pbehn]

The Parthenon in Athens was used as a gunpowder store with predictable results for the Elgin Marbles. Almost every major city in Europe burned down in the 1600s before people decided to stop making cities made of wooden houses a few feet apart. In some fields humans are very, very slow learners, people still jump into the sea and drown every year trying to rescue their dogs who can swim and get out of the water a short time later.

 

[AMCKen]

Largest artificial non-nuclear explosions - Wikipedia

 

[swampyankee]

Scientific American has an on-line article about this, with some references to the West, Texas explosion in 2013. They also have an article about its thermochemistry at What Is Ammonium Nitrate, the Chemical That Exploded in Beirut?.

The Lebanese security services and military forces told people for years that this was a dangerous chemical that needed to be moved to a safer storage location. They were ignored. Yep; ammonium nitrate's instability is only a theory.