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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

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?

op03 6y ago
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.
walrus01 6y ago
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.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  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.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Ammonium nitrate.
- recuter 6y ago
  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.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    If it's not a big mystery, why so coy about saying whatever it is you seem to mean?
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Either fertilizer or explosives?
      - fit2rule 6y ago
        I think the subtext is that it was stored in case it needed to be used for explosives. Just think of all the gardens that could have grown instead.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    What kind of mysterious and nefarious use requires that you leave whats effectively a small nuclear weapon in a major population center? Maybe it least move it to a remote area, where the worst it can do is crater a field
tomohawk 6y ago
Hezbollah is known to stockpile around this amount of explosives. One stockpile was discovered in London in 2015, and another was discovered in Germany. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/hezbollah-stockpiled-chemical-behind-beirut-blast-in-london-637578 https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/hezbollah-stockpiled-chemi... Lebanon is Hezbollah's headquarters.
- walrus01 6y ago
  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.
  - Jach 6y ago
    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.
    - dgellow 6y ago
      An explosion destroying the main city of the country as a way to postpone a verdict by 2 weeks makes little to no sense.
dmurray 6y ago
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. https://gcaptain.com/beirut-blast-two-killed-on-orient-queen-cruise-ship-docked-near-explosion-ship-sinks/ https://gcaptain.com/beirut-blast-two-killed-on-orient-queen...
BurningFrog 6y ago
That was 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate. Finding someone willing to take the risk of storing that is probably non trivial. As is transportation.
rsynnott 6y ago
> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters
- ClikeX 6y ago
  Of course there's a Wikipedia article for it. With a concerning amount of listing. "A truck carrying dynamite and 4.5 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire early in the morning of August 7, 1959. "
rootusrootus 6y ago
> the ship not be able to roll back upright There are pictures on twitter [1] of the ship listing but still upright, so it seems it sank from damage. [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eemmk9mXkAElWIY?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eemmk9mXkAElWIY?format=jpg&name=...
refurb 6y ago
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.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  It looks like it filled with water and listed.
Jedd 6y ago
> ... 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.
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  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. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-concern-about-newcastle-ammonium-nitrate/12527546 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-c...
  - ekimekim 6y ago
    "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.
    - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
      > 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...
    - VLM 6y ago
      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.
olivermarks 6y ago
A couple of interesting New Scientist links: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251076-beirut-explosion-what-caused-the-blast-and-what-else-do-we-know/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251076-beirut-explosio... https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619750-300-cherry-red-and-very-dangerous/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619750-300-cherry-r...
- CamperBob2 6y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
  - olivermarks 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_mercury&offset=&limit=500&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_mercury&offse...
michaelt 6y ago
> 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? If they won't arrest you for stealing thousands of tons of explosives from a government warehouse, what would they arrest you for?

op03 6y ago

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.

walrus01 6y ago

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.

Gibbon1 6y ago
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.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Ammonium nitrate.
recuter 6y ago
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.
- throwanem 6y ago
  If it's not a big mystery, why so coy about saying whatever it is you seem to mean?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Either fertilizer or explosives?
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      I think the subtext is that it was stored in case it needed to be used for explosives. Just think of all the gardens that could have grown instead.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  What kind of mysterious and nefarious use requires that you leave whats effectively a small nuclear weapon in a major population center? Maybe it least move it to a remote area, where the worst it can do is crater a field

tomohawk 6y ago

Hezbollah is known to stockpile around this amount of explosives. One stockpile was discovered in London in 2015, and another was discovered in Germany. https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/hezbollah-stockpiled-chemical-behind-beirut-blast-in-london-637578 https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/hezbollah-stockpiled-chemi... Lebanon is Hezbollah's headquarters.

walrus01 6y ago
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.
- Jach 6y ago
  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.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    An explosion destroying the main city of the country as a way to postpone a verdict by 2 weeks makes little to no sense.

dmurray 6y ago

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. https://gcaptain.com/beirut-blast-two-killed-on-orient-queen-cruise-ship-docked-near-explosion-ship-sinks/ https://gcaptain.com/beirut-blast-two-killed-on-orient-queen...

BurningFrog 6y ago

That was 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate. Finding someone willing to take the risk of storing that is probably non trivial. As is transportation.

rsynnott 6y ago

> 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_nitrate_disasters

ClikeX 6y ago
Of course there's a Wikipedia article for it. With a concerning amount of listing. "A truck carrying dynamite and 4.5 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire early in the morning of August 7, 1959. "

rootusrootus 6y ago

> the ship not be able to roll back upright There are pictures on twitter [1] of the ship listing but still upright, so it seems it sank from damage. [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eemmk9mXkAElWIY?format=jpg&name=4096x4096 https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eemmk9mXkAElWIY?format=jpg&name=...

refurb 6y ago

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.

saagarjha 6y ago
It looks like it filled with water and listed.

Jedd 6y ago

> ... 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.

paranoidrobot 6y ago
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. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-concern-about-newcastle-ammonium-nitrate/12527546 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/beirut-blast-raises-c...
- ekimekim 6y ago
  "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.
  - Tuna-Fish 6y ago
    > 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...
  - VLM 6y ago
    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.

olivermarks 6y ago

A couple of interesting New Scientist links: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251076-beirut-explosion-what-caused-the-blast-and-what-else-do-we-know/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/2251076-beirut-explosio... https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619750-300-cherry-red-and-very-dangerous/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14619750-300-cherry-r...

CamperBob2 6y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_mercury
- olivermarks 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_mercury&offset=&limit=500&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Red_mercury&offse...

michaelt 6y ago

> 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? If they won't arrest you for stealing thousands of tons of explosives from a government warehouse, what would they arrest you for?