5 ms·

If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous. The real question is, why we

If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous. The real question is, why were the explosives there? But pursuing that question might make powerful people uncomfortable, or lead to less satisfying conclusions about institutions deliberately designed to disperse accountability.

MattGaiser 6y ago
> The real question is, why were the explosives there? In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure? It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it.
- rectang 6y ago
  I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action. The Port Authority? The courts? The Army? The General Directorate of State Security? This Reuters article is maddening, but it hits much closer to the truth than all the pointless "welding is dangerous" threads going on right now around us: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-documents-excl/exclusive-lebanons-leaders-warned-in-july-about-explosives-at-port-documents-idUSKCN2562L7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-do... The hypothesis I tend to reach for is a general lack of "good government", originating because the factional tension in Lebanon completely overshadows any other political differentiation. The factions can't compete on competence because votes are locked in by group identity.
  - Sharlin 6y ago
    > I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action. That's exactly the problem. They weren't either.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
    In an advanced country with a modern legal system, like, say, Australia, the answer to your question is: Every single person who knew the dangers is personally liable for up to $50,000 for an individual, if I recall correctly. And for industrial manslaughter the maximum penalty is 20 years jail and AU$10 million for a business operator: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/business-fined-3m-under-new-industrial-manslaughter-laws-20200611-p551mp https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/business-fine...
    - Dahoon 6y ago
      A modern legal system and an advanced country doesn't have or allow concentration style camps for immigrants or do its best to ruin the lives and rights of the original people. That rules out Australia.
      - jiggawatts 6y ago
        And the United States also, by that metric...
      - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        Not an entirely unfair point! If we discount everyone with any faults, we'll never get anywhere.
    - bjowen 6y ago
      The concentration camps aren’t a mark of the effectiveness of the legal system so much as one of the political system - as inexcusable as they are, the country still manages to have mechanisms of state to administer airspace, health and safety and so on. But those institutions are fragile, especially when they're exposed to the political system (robodebt and the Murray-Darling authority spring to mind) but it’s also possible for dangerous situations to evolve in pretty well-defined regulatory frameworks. There’s a bunch of case law around situations such as buildings that failed inspections under one code or another, then caught fire and destroyed neighbouring property before the compliance deadline had elapsed. Common law negligence is there to catch these sorts of cases, but it’s much more of a way to assign liability than to guide behaviour. I haven’t followed the West Footscray fire from a couple of years ago, but it definitely had the signs of something that slipped through the cracks between regulations, which leaves it a matter of luck that it wasn’t something super duper toxic, explosive, or flammable and under pressure.
- antris 6y ago
  Highly structured and rule driven practices are key to all safety. Hospitals, military, airlines all depend on a rigid set of safety instructions that are followed without exceptions. Same goes for explosives. Many governments around the world set various different rules around storage of explosives, and the Beirut port explosion was a result of ignoring pretty much all of them. It's an example of what happens when the government isn't there to do its job.
- ninth_ant 6y ago
  > In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure? It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it. This class of problem isn’t unique to governments. Modern society has a whole host of problems that are caused by externalities generated by corporations.
  - rectang 6y ago
    The common thread is that in both cases, those entities and individuals closest to the problem have strong incentives to do nothing (prevention is a thankless, costly task), and so it falls to the general populace to create incentives to hold them accountable.
    - MattGaiser 6y ago
      And you will be blamed for imperfect prevention. Say that the army spent $20,000 moving the fertilizer to a disposal site. Would someone get in trouble for that? Yep.
- lb1lf 6y ago
  -This is not meant as a witticism, but suggesting the Lebanese government is 'highly structured and rule driven' is giving it way too much credit. Cynical me find the explanation that AN fertiliser simply is too cheap more likely - it simply wasn't worth the effort to -ahem- reallocate the resources from the warehouse it was stored in.
atoav 6y ago
To be honest it doesn't even have to be that high level. Corruption can stack: you bribe the guy at the customs so it is declared as sth else for example — suddenly the AM you are storing is mountain dew. Or you bribe some other clerk to not file it in a certain category. Suddenly it is not dangerous. You could even imagine a chain of corruption (=paid lies) to lead to such an outcome. Assuming the on-paper representation of a world a corrupt society produces is accurate enough to base meaningful decisions on them is very optimistic at least. What was extraordinary was the scale of the blast and the human tragedy it produced. But the fact that it happened wasn't very surprising to anyone who knows a bit about the Lebanon.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I was watching some Feynman interview recently and he was talking about how one day noodling with a geiger counter he found a hot spot in an storage room, and discovered that the operations people were storing uranium in suspension, and either the ratio was wrong, or the tanks were too big, and so the neutron flux was too high. Since the nuclear physics was all highly classified, they couldn't just explain the entire situation directly, but he played up the severity to make sure people paid attention (because the next mistake would be much worse). They reworked the guidelines, and as part of this they also had to point out that storing two tanks of uranium in separate rooms but on the same wall was also a really exceptionally bad idea. If you can tell people what's going on, there is plenty of room for human error. If you can't tell them, for any reasons ranging from graft to state secrets, well then you've got a much bigger surface area for disasters.
draw_down 6y ago
I agree but I think it's ok to acknowledge the proximate cause while remembering the ultimate cause. You can say it was caused by the welders without them being to blame for it. Imagine they weren't told about the explosives, it still would be the case they caused the blast but not really possible for them to be at fault.
gwern 6y ago
> early this year they had learned that one of the warehouse's doors was broken, raising the risk that a malicious actor could steal dangerous explosives. The port's welding contractors set off the cache while trying to repair the door to protect the cache. I'm reminded of a maxim I heard somewhere about failures in complex systems: "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure".
- FatalLogic 6y ago
  >... "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure". When those failure-prevention mechanisms are bolt-on solutions that make a complex system even more complex, perhaps that's not surprising. In this case, for example, the complex system needed to be simplified, by removing the explosives. But instead it was made more complex.
mschuster91 6y ago
> If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous. Having indications that it was a work accident is good because that all but excludes terrorism or, worse, acts of a hostile nation. That is the last thimg the world needs right now. Within minutes of the explosion making the rounds on Twitter, people began to speculate that the Mossad blew up something, that the Hezbollah or some ISIS remnants fucked up some new weapon or whatever, or that the old religio-ethnic rift would be an open war again.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> The real question is, why were the explosives there? In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure? It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it.

rectang 6y ago
I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action. The Port Authority? The courts? The Army? The General Directorate of State Security? This Reuters article is maddening, but it hits much closer to the truth than all the pointless "welding is dangerous" threads going on right now around us: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-documents-excl/exclusive-lebanons-leaders-warned-in-july-about-explosives-at-port-documents-idUSKCN2562L7 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-do... The hypothesis I tend to reach for is a general lack of "good government", originating because the factional tension in Lebanon completely overshadows any other political differentiation. The factions can't compete on competence because votes are locked in by group identity.
- Sharlin 6y ago
  > I've read numerous articles and although it seems lots of people knew the situation was dangerous and lots of letters flew back and forth, I'm still not clear on who had jurisdiction or failed to take action. That's exactly the problem. They weren't either.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
  In an advanced country with a modern legal system, like, say, Australia, the answer to your question is: Every single person who knew the dangers is personally liable for up to $50,000 for an individual, if I recall correctly. And for industrial manslaughter the maximum penalty is 20 years jail and AU$10 million for a business operator: https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/business-fined-3m-under-new-industrial-manslaughter-laws-20200611-p551mp https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/business-fine...
  - Dahoon 6y ago
    A modern legal system and an advanced country doesn't have or allow concentration style camps for immigrants or do its best to ruin the lives and rights of the original people. That rules out Australia.
    - jiggawatts 6y ago
      And the United States also, by that metric...
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      Not an entirely unfair point! If we discount everyone with any faults, we'll never get anywhere.
  - bjowen 6y ago
    The concentration camps aren’t a mark of the effectiveness of the legal system so much as one of the political system - as inexcusable as they are, the country still manages to have mechanisms of state to administer airspace, health and safety and so on. But those institutions are fragile, especially when they're exposed to the political system (robodebt and the Murray-Darling authority spring to mind) but it’s also possible for dangerous situations to evolve in pretty well-defined regulatory frameworks. There’s a bunch of case law around situations such as buildings that failed inspections under one code or another, then caught fire and destroyed neighbouring property before the compliance deadline had elapsed. Common law negligence is there to catch these sorts of cases, but it’s much more of a way to assign liability than to guide behaviour. I haven’t followed the West Footscray fire from a couple of years ago, but it definitely had the signs of something that slipped through the cracks between regulations, which leaves it a matter of luck that it wasn’t something super duper toxic, explosive, or flammable and under pressure.
antris 6y ago
Highly structured and rule driven practices are key to all safety. Hospitals, military, airlines all depend on a rigid set of safety instructions that are followed without exceptions. Same goes for explosives. Many governments around the world set various different rules around storage of explosives, and the Beirut port explosion was a result of ignoring pretty much all of them. It's an example of what happens when the government isn't there to do its job.
ninth_ant 6y ago
> In a highly structured and rule driven entity (government) what happens when a problem falls outside the set up structure? It tends to be ignored as nobody is responsible for dealing with it. This class of problem isn’t unique to governments. Modern society has a whole host of problems that are caused by externalities generated by corporations.
- rectang 6y ago
  The common thread is that in both cases, those entities and individuals closest to the problem have strong incentives to do nothing (prevention is a thankless, costly task), and so it falls to the general populace to create incentives to hold them accountable.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    And you will be blamed for imperfect prevention. Say that the army spent $20,000 moving the fertilizer to a disposal site. Would someone get in trouble for that? Yep.
lb1lf 6y ago
-This is not meant as a witticism, but suggesting the Lebanese government is 'highly structured and rule driven' is giving it way too much credit. Cynical me find the explanation that AN fertiliser simply is too cheap more likely - it simply wasn't worth the effort to -ahem- reallocate the resources from the warehouse it was stored in.

atoav 6y ago

To be honest it doesn't even have to be that high level. Corruption can stack: you bribe the guy at the customs so it is declared as sth else for example — suddenly the AM you are storing is mountain dew. Or you bribe some other clerk to not file it in a certain category. Suddenly it is not dangerous. You could even imagine a chain of corruption (=paid lies) to lead to such an outcome. Assuming the on-paper representation of a world a corrupt society produces is accurate enough to base meaningful decisions on them is very optimistic at least. What was extraordinary was the scale of the blast and the human tragedy it produced. But the fact that it happened wasn't very surprising to anyone who knows a bit about the Lebanon.

hinkley 6y ago
I was watching some Feynman interview recently and he was talking about how one day noodling with a geiger counter he found a hot spot in an storage room, and discovered that the operations people were storing uranium in suspension, and either the ratio was wrong, or the tanks were too big, and so the neutron flux was too high. Since the nuclear physics was all highly classified, they couldn't just explain the entire situation directly, but he played up the severity to make sure people paid attention (because the next mistake would be much worse). They reworked the guidelines, and as part of this they also had to point out that storing two tanks of uranium in separate rooms but on the same wall was also a really exceptionally bad idea. If you can tell people what's going on, there is plenty of room for human error. If you can't tell them, for any reasons ranging from graft to state secrets, well then you've got a much bigger surface area for disasters.

draw_down 6y ago

I agree but I think it's ok to acknowledge the proximate cause while remembering the ultimate cause. You can say it was caused by the welders without them being to blame for it. Imagine they weren't told about the explosives, it still would be the case they caused the blast but not really possible for them to be at fault.

gwern 6y ago

> early this year they had learned that one of the warehouse's doors was broken, raising the risk that a malicious actor could steal dangerous explosives. The port's welding contractors set off the cache while trying to repair the door to protect the cache. I'm reminded of a maxim I heard somewhere about failures in complex systems: "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure".

FatalLogic 6y ago
>... "the mechanisms you add to prevent failures are themselves a major cause of failure". When those failure-prevention mechanisms are bolt-on solutions that make a complex system even more complex, perhaps that's not surprising. In this case, for example, the complex system needed to be simplified, by removing the explosives. But instead it was made more complex.

mschuster91 6y ago

> If the conclusion you reach is that welders should be scapegoated for blowing up Beirut, then you are either corrupt or cretinous. Having indications that it was a work accident is good because that all but excludes terrorism or, worse, acts of a hostile nation. That is the last thimg the world needs right now. Within minutes of the explosion making the rounds on Twitter, people began to speculate that the Mossad blew up something, that the Hezbollah or some ISIS remnants fucked up some new weapon or whatever, or that the old religio-ethnic rift would be an open war again.