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The grain store probably shielded a lot of other infrastructure and people too. However it seems very irresponsible to keep 85% of the country's grain in a sin

The grain store probably shielded a lot of other infrastructure and people too. However it seems very irresponsible to keep 85% of the country's grain in a single spot. It's scary how so many single points of failure exist.

qubex 6y ago
Yeah I’ve been thinking about that too... harsh as it may sound, big concrete cylinders fillded with loose grain is pretty much the best pillow to cushion the blow you could think of. EDIT: As for the grain silos being “single points of failure”, that depends on the scope of the system you’re considering. Nationally, yeah... but internationally, there’s plenty and it’s being shipped in. So there’s actually more redundancy than the narrow-scope analysis would suggest. The 85% figure is just a figment of where one draws the borders, and national borders probably don’t have much valence in the given context (fortunately). Now, if we were speaking about 85% of the world’s ability to ship grain... now that would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.
- HPsquared 6y ago
  There probably won't be much shipping of any kind in that port for a while... Hopefully they can make other arrangements.
- secondcoming 6y ago
  I did consider that the dust present in a grain silo could make made a 'flour bomb' and compounded the explosion. Maybe not
  - qubex 6y ago
    To be perfectly honest, that was my very first reaction when I first watched the video: it looked like the fuming aftermath of Something Really Bad, and then BOOM! Something Really Bad unfolded on-screen. I figured that it must’ve been some kind of aerosol/powder combustion triggered by the fireworks’ conflagration, but then more learned analyses of cloud hue and knowledge of what was actually stored in situ (correctly) overrode my initial reaction and the fertilizer was identified as the main culprit.
jakub_g 6y ago
There have been some works to expand the Tripoli port to avoid single point of failure, but apparently (from the podcast I heard) they've been going slow for political reasons (including regular people of Beirut profiting from the near-monopoly).
anonu 6y ago
Lebanon is a tiny country, the size of Connecticut. There are a lot of things that were irresponsible in this story in Beirut, but I don't think the grain silo is one of them

qubex 6y ago

Yeah I’ve been thinking about that too... harsh as it may sound, big concrete cylinders fillded with loose grain is pretty much the best pillow to cushion the blow you could think of. EDIT: As for the grain silos being “single points of failure”, that depends on the scope of the system you’re considering. Nationally, yeah... but internationally, there’s plenty and it’s being shipped in. So there’s actually more redundancy than the narrow-scope analysis would suggest. The 85% figure is just a figment of where one draws the borders, and national borders probably don’t have much valence in the given context (fortunately). Now, if we were speaking about 85% of the world’s ability to ship grain... now that would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

HPsquared 6y ago
There probably won't be much shipping of any kind in that port for a while... Hopefully they can make other arrangements.
secondcoming 6y ago
I did consider that the dust present in a grain silo could make made a 'flour bomb' and compounded the explosion. Maybe not
- qubex 6y ago
  To be perfectly honest, that was my very first reaction when I first watched the video: it looked like the fuming aftermath of Something Really Bad, and then BOOM! Something Really Bad unfolded on-screen. I figured that it must’ve been some kind of aerosol/powder combustion triggered by the fireworks’ conflagration, but then more learned analyses of cloud hue and knowledge of what was actually stored in situ (correctly) overrode my initial reaction and the fertilizer was identified as the main culprit.

jakub_g 6y ago

There have been some works to expand the Tripoli port to avoid single point of failure, but apparently (from the podcast I heard) they've been going slow for political reasons (including regular people of Beirut profiting from the near-monopoly).

anonu 6y ago

Lebanon is a tiny country, the size of Connecticut. There are a lot of things that were irresponsible in this story in Beirut, but I don't think the grain silo is one of them