11 ms·

FBI probe: nitrate amount in Beirut blast was a fraction of original shipment

235 points by yyyk 5y ago

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
> 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship >The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment. There is either in economy of scale that is so wildly unknown to me - or this was some shady shit to begin with.
- wmf 5y ago
  https://ihsmarkit.com/products/fertilizers-nitrates.html https://ihsmarkit.com/products/fertilizers-nitrates.html Global use of nitrate fertilizer is in tens of millions of tons and prices are ~$200/ton. The seized fertilizer was worth only half a million dollars; I can imagine repairs on a cargo ship could easily cost more.
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Are you making an assumption that it was fertilizer as a product? A lower grade AN. The article says AN which can be used for fertilizer or explosives. They never said exactly what it was. We have no idea if this was $200 a ton fertilizer, or reagent lab grade high purity etc, right?
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  There is this weird "worst of all worlds" where ships aren't maintained because owners are too cheap. If they break down before they reach the destination (or get hit with unexpected port fees), the cost of the repairs can be more than the value of the ship + cargo. So the owner just stops answering the phone (or rather the untraceable faceless fake corporation in a tax haven jurisdiction does). Then the crew are stuck: they won't get paid. But the port the ship is in won't let them leave with the ship without paying the fees, which they can't. And they aren't allowed to leave without the ship (and fly home or whatever) because the authorises don't want the ship to just sit there rusting or sink. That's what happened here. It can go on for decades. The issue here was that the courts said the cargo couldn't be seized as no one knew who the owner was in order to sue. So it just had to be stored forever. For some crazy reason they also refused to allow it to be moved out of the highly populated, busy port city. Not sure why that was... It's apparently quite common for this crap to happen and no one really cares. The big losers are crews. The winners are consumers getting a few nano percent less in shipping costs...
  - fragmede 5y ago
    that consumers get things for slightly cheaper seems like a side-effect. The winners would be the owners of the vessel who have done the X vs Y math, and enjoy the extra money from having done so.
  - structural 5y ago
    The dirty secret is that shipping is a rarely profitable industry, so the "owners are too cheap" aspect is really the owners trying to go out of business as slowly as possible, hoping that times will improve in the future: if the shipping company goes out of business, it cares not one bit for the maintenance state of its fleet. So what do you do if you're a country that doesn't want this to happen? Well, we tried regulating how international shippers operate, and it turns out that it's expensive to do that. So we ended up with flags of convenience. It'd be easy to think that you could say "well, you need to be well-maintained, etc., etc., in order to dock at and use our country's ports" -- but that doesn't work either. There's no global inspection regime to make sure the ship is in good repair when it leaves the last port (and it can break down on the passage so that the only place it can be repaired to move again is at the same port you'd like to prevent it from using). You also can't be too heavy-handed about the whole thing, because shipping is pretty essential to the operation of industrialized countries, and if too many shippers were to be driven out of business the result might likely be worse than the current status quo.
    - petra 5y ago
      Why is shipping rarely profitable ? the barriers to entry are large, and at least in theory that should give companies some stable margin ?
      - perl4ever 5y ago
        I don't know, but DryShips is an amusing example. https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/DRYS https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/DRYS Because of reverse splits, the stock appears to have peaked at around $1.5B per share in late 2007. If you multiply that by the shares now outstanding you get about $130 trillion. Which of course it was never worth. They kept issuing shares and getting asymptotically closer to zero, but I'm not sure they ever actually went out of business.
- structural 5y ago
  2754 tonnes is not really considered a large amount of material on the scale of global logistics. That's even closer to "regular weekly/monthly delivery" numbers than a large or special shipment.
sparrish 5y ago
It could have been stolen, as the FBI suggests. Or it had been sitting in a sea port warehouse for 7 years. As it is hygroscopic and readily absorbs moisture from the atmosphere, it may be that the shipment had broken down over that time and only 20% of its explosive energy remained.
- aurizon 5y ago
  They normally ship in heavy plastic bags. There is a little water vapor transmission, but not enough to seriously degrade the Ammonium Nitrate - except for tears/punctures etc. One press release commented about damaged cargo. My guess is the local terrorists used it as an explosives bank. Being a customs port, it should all the watched/counted, but beirut is one of the most corrupt countries on earth = easy to steal/import anything. Now you know how Hezbollah gats their stuff, as I am sure Israel knows and monitors well.
  - ficklepickle 5y ago
    The bags were torn. They couldn't even give the stuff away, and not for lack of trying.
    - aurizon 5y ago
      I feel this material was intentionally stranded in this customs purdah for the purpose of providing explosives to terrorists and over the years ~~four-fifths of it was removed from a supposedly secure customs enclave. The explosion was so intense that it was all detonated - it is possible a small amount was scattered, but no significant residual unexploded Ammonium Nitrate was found.
- oivey 5y ago
  I’m sure they considered that. It’s rather obvious, and the degradation of the material was openly reported in the news at the time.
tpmx 5y ago
> Many officials in Lebanon have previously said in private they believe a lot of the shipment was stolen. This seems plausible. If so, this would be one of those few times where lawlessness/corruption/incompetence kinda paid off. Imagine the damage to Beirut if there had been 5x more ammonium nitrate to blow up... (Of course, it was the same kind of general governmental incompetence that caused the ammonium nitrate to be stored there to begin with.)
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Unless the fire and explosion was deliberate to cover up the fact it had mostly all been stolen... And maybe the explosion turned out much larger than the thieves expected...
  - eloff 5y ago
    That's plausible. Never underestimate greed and the desire to avoid being caught for a crime.
    - bogomipz 5y ago
      No. While it is "possible" it is certainly not "plausible." Please explain why if you were trying to divert attention away from a stolen good such as fertilizer you would engage in a criminal act on such a scale as to get the world to focus on the very thing you would like to draw attention away from?
      - eloff 5y ago
        If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces of the theft and nobody would know any better. Many people, especially uneducated people, would not have expected that the theft would be detectable by the size of the explosion. I'm pretty smart and well educated, but I'm not even sure such a thing would have occurred to me, and even if it did I might have preferred my odds taking my chances on that anyway. To be very clear though, I wouldn't have done something so heinous in the first place. Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc, I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning you gave.
wwwhizz 5y ago
I'm not American, and I am genuinely curious, why does the FBI investigate this? I can imagine the US government wanting an investigation in cases like this, and I can understand Beirut wanting (or maybe just allowing) different countries to investigate, but isn't foreign investigations a job of the CIA (or, at least, not the FBI)?
- bogomipz 5y ago
  One of the remits of the FBI is to protect the US from terrorist attacks. And as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombings were fertilizer-based this likely would have fallen into their purview. The CIA is supposed to be concerned only with intelligence-gathering. The FBI has offices around the world. See: https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/international-operations https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/internati...
- jdavis703 5y ago
  The CIA doesn’t really do these kinds of investigations. To be honest I would’ve expected ATF (they specialize in investigating explosions in the US) to have been the US agency lending technical assistance.
- rickeydidio 5y ago
  I am American and this was my first thought when reading the headline. “Why is the FBI involved?” I can understand the CIA, like you said. So weird but a sign of our times.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    When you hear CIA think intelligence (as in espionage), when you hear FBI think investigation, never failed me
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      When I hear CIA, I think coercion to collect information, most usually information to be used to coerce somebody else. When I hear FBI I think coercion to instigate what will be well-publicized conspiratorial crime. Actual espionage and investigation are decidedly secondary activities. They have been that way from the start.
citizenpaul 5y ago
How to get your bomb materials through shipping customs and international regulations. Have a ship loaded with explosives come to port. Openly report it as illegal. Levy fines and fees to someone that you know will reject paying them. Declare the ship unsafe to leave unless it is repaired by the same people that refuse to pay the fees. Do nothing. Now you have a legal bomb supply station.
- CPLX 5y ago
  I mean it’s a theory, but ammonium nitrate is an incredibly common farming input. At the nation state level especially I don’t think you’d need to concoct a complicated scheme to get your hands on it.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    But Hamas, ISIS, FSA, Hezbollah, cannot simply park their bomb materials in a well-functioning port. No, they would need some sort of semi-failed state, in a big city with many places to hide, yes ... and one sharing a flimsy border with a warzone like Syria. And once the materials enter the warzone, they effectively disappear, and could reappear anywhere in the region. Where on the map could we find such a port?
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    I read this as another group, not a nation state, wanting and stealing the ammonium nitrate. Most of it was stolen before the blast — terrorist groups? Low-level thugs? Who knows, but you’re right that a nation state doesn’t need to steal it in this way. That’s why it points to other parties. It may be incredibly common but not in the quantity that was stolen.
    - pvaldes 5y ago
      Must take in mind that the stuff also decomposes spontaneously. If stored for many months in bad conditions of conservation some amount just would go silently to the air in form of water vapor and laughing gas.
  - 5y ago
firstSpeaker 5y ago
Level oc corruption in Lebanon is unbelievable. Every government worker that has the right to approve something has at least two counter signer that need to approve or sign the same thing, still there is wild corruption running through the country.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  It’s only a few countries where rampant corruption is the exception and not the rule — the US is one such country but many Americans don’t recognize this because they have no comparison reference.
  - jbverschoor 5y ago
    The EU is just as bad.. my mic was cut of when I asked a couple of questions. Afterwards they said I couldn’t ask those kinds of question or they’ll all end up in jail.
    - dnh44 5y ago
      Care to share where you were when your mic was cut and what your questions were?
      - jbverschoor 5y ago
        At the EUIPO in Brussels & Alicante.. And the lobbying by Amazon is simply disgusting to see. The EU officials sucking up to the representatives of Amazon.
        dnh44 5y ago
        That's really depressing and I sort of wish I hadn't asked now but thank you for sharing.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      The EU is a big place. Was this France or Bulgaria?
Hacktrick 5y ago
Imagine if the full 2,754 tons exploded.
- robotnikman 5y ago
  The Halifax explosion of 1917 would give you a good idea of what it would have looked like
jvdvegt 5y ago
Without paywall: https://archive.is/LsTS5 https://archive.is/LsTS5
- lgats 5y ago
  Using CloudFlare DNS / WARP I am never able to pass the captcha on archive.is
  - opheliate 5y ago
    There have always been issues with Cloudflare's DNS and archive.is, IIRC it's because Cloudflare don't pass on some information that the operators of archive.is think they should. Unfortunate, but both parties perceive it as something the other should fix. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/18227 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1017902875949793285 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1017902875949793285
dredmorbius 5y ago
Forensic Architecture's investigation released about 8 months ago used blast modeling to estimate that "as little as half of the 2,700 tons" exploded. The FBI's estimate cuts that estimate by about half. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-explosion https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-... Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177 There was speculation at the time (including some by myself) as to what could account for the reduced yield relative to the total initial shipment quantity.
erdewit 5y ago
> FBI say blast consistent with 552 tonnes of chemicals Seems unlikely that this estimate can have three digits of precision, which begs the question what the real margin of error is.
- ThePadawan 5y ago
  I actually don't find this to be unreasonably precise. I saw a video that showed how the blast was captured on around a dozen independent devices (smartphones, surveillance cameras) and how that data could be used to reconstruct a very good 3D capture of the blast and resulting smoke cloud. If the FBI spent X hours of simulation time to reproduce the 3D results captured on those videos, they might get it down to that precision (and who knows, maybe they just ran a lot of renders and 552 was the one that looked most right, while anything between 538 and 564 was also fine).
- loufe 5y ago
  Agreed, it does beg the question. Three digits of precision does not mean there isn't an error of +- 100 tonnes on the actual source calculation. I can imagine an engineer in the FBI did some modeling using damage radius, height of blast, etc. to get a rough estimate. News, being news, cuts off the error or the FBI, trying to look very competent, omits the error.
- amelius 5y ago
  Significant digits isn't always the best way to denote a number and its accuracy. If a simulation says 552 +/- 100, then how would you write down the fact that the expectation is centered around 552 and there is an error of 100, using a single number?
  - contravariant 5y ago
    The best you can do with a single number would be something like 6·10^2 tons, you also use 6 hectotons or 0.6 gigagram though people might find those a bit weird. Or you could just denote its accuracy, which the original source likely does, but which news article inevitably fail to include (and subsequently fail to adjust the number of significant digits).
p5a0u9l 5y ago
Is anyone else nervous About keeping that much explosive material on hand may Be more sinister than run-of-the-mill incompetence and bureaucracy? Like, this is a perfect opportunity to slowly sell large amounts of a regulated material, ammonium nitrate, on the black market? I usually guard against conspiratorial Explanations when mere incompetence will suffice. But this does speak to two compelling explanatory narratives. First why in the world other than the reported bureaucracy would they keep that much just laying around. Second slowly selling over time explains the missing material from the FBI estimate.
zahma 5y ago
I wonder how much of that nitrate is in Hezbollah’s hands and therefore accessible to Iran? Might very well have had some of our own troops or allies killed by bombs made with the missing nitrate. Foreign aid payments have been shown to be subject to avarice and corruption, and so the trend is to fund specific projects with deliverables and measurable success rates. There’s no reason we should be sending this stuff to a country like Lebanon given the political climate in that country for the better part or seven decades.
- jorblumesea 5y ago
  Nation states have no problem securing the raw precursors for explosives. The idea that Iran need some complex scheme is a little far fetched. Hezbollah, perhaps.
anonu 5y ago
August 4 will mark 1 year since this explosion. Lebanon has continued to devolve into an abyss of financial ruin (90% of savings have been wiped out by hyper-inflation), government incompetence (no government or even an inkling of one forming anytime soon), rolling blackouts (lebanons electrical capacity is 900GW with a peak demand of 3000GW - the gap is insurmountable in any reasonable amount of time), the international community has given up giving Lebanon any aid. Where did the rest of AN go? I am pretty sure Hezbollah knows the answer.
- CyberRage 5y ago
  When you let a terror organization run your country... it doesn't work
tobmlt 5y ago
First you steal the ammonium nitrate, but he sure to leave behind enough to blow up all the evidence (except that which may be deduced by dimensional analysis, if you are GI Taylor ;) Edit: Sorry I simply meant to be imaginative. I didn’t realize there was a conspiracy theory along these lines. I just like the GI Taylor story.
cheaprentalyeti 5y ago
It wasn't stolen. It was "stolen" in the process of being supplied to Hezbollah with plausible deniability by Russia.

235 points by yyyk 5y ago

> 2,754 tonnes that arrived on a Russian-leased cargo ship >The ship arrived in Beirut in November 2013 but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. No one ever came forward to claim the shipment. There is either in economy of scale that is so wildly unknown to me - or this was some shady shit to begin with.

wmf 5y ago
https://ihsmarkit.com/products/fertilizers-nitrates.html https://ihsmarkit.com/products/fertilizers-nitrates.html Global use of nitrate fertilizer is in tens of millions of tons and prices are ~$200/ton. The seized fertilizer was worth only half a million dollars; I can imagine repairs on a cargo ship could easily cost more.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  Are you making an assumption that it was fertilizer as a product? A lower grade AN. The article says AN which can be used for fertilizer or explosives. They never said exactly what it was. We have no idea if this was $200 a ton fertilizer, or reagent lab grade high purity etc, right?
LatteLazy 5y ago
There is this weird "worst of all worlds" where ships aren't maintained because owners are too cheap. If they break down before they reach the destination (or get hit with unexpected port fees), the cost of the repairs can be more than the value of the ship + cargo. So the owner just stops answering the phone (or rather the untraceable faceless fake corporation in a tax haven jurisdiction does). Then the crew are stuck: they won't get paid. But the port the ship is in won't let them leave with the ship without paying the fees, which they can't. And they aren't allowed to leave without the ship (and fly home or whatever) because the authorises don't want the ship to just sit there rusting or sink. That's what happened here. It can go on for decades. The issue here was that the courts said the cargo couldn't be seized as no one knew who the owner was in order to sue. So it just had to be stored forever. For some crazy reason they also refused to allow it to be moved out of the highly populated, busy port city. Not sure why that was... It's apparently quite common for this crap to happen and no one really cares. The big losers are crews. The winners are consumers getting a few nano percent less in shipping costs...
- fragmede 5y ago
  that consumers get things for slightly cheaper seems like a side-effect. The winners would be the owners of the vessel who have done the X vs Y math, and enjoy the extra money from having done so.
- structural 5y ago
  The dirty secret is that shipping is a rarely profitable industry, so the "owners are too cheap" aspect is really the owners trying to go out of business as slowly as possible, hoping that times will improve in the future: if the shipping company goes out of business, it cares not one bit for the maintenance state of its fleet. So what do you do if you're a country that doesn't want this to happen? Well, we tried regulating how international shippers operate, and it turns out that it's expensive to do that. So we ended up with flags of convenience. It'd be easy to think that you could say "well, you need to be well-maintained, etc., etc., in order to dock at and use our country's ports" -- but that doesn't work either. There's no global inspection regime to make sure the ship is in good repair when it leaves the last port (and it can break down on the passage so that the only place it can be repaired to move again is at the same port you'd like to prevent it from using). You also can't be too heavy-handed about the whole thing, because shipping is pretty essential to the operation of industrialized countries, and if too many shippers were to be driven out of business the result might likely be worse than the current status quo.
  - petra 5y ago
    Why is shipping rarely profitable ? the barriers to entry are large, and at least in theory that should give companies some stable margin ?
    - perl4ever 5y ago
      I don't know, but DryShips is an amusing example. https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/DRYS https://www.barchart.com/stocks/quotes/DRYS Because of reverse splits, the stock appears to have peaked at around $1.5B per share in late 2007. If you multiply that by the shares now outstanding you get about $130 trillion. Which of course it was never worth. They kept issuing shares and getting asymptotically closer to zero, but I'm not sure they ever actually went out of business.
structural 5y ago
2754 tonnes is not really considered a large amount of material on the scale of global logistics. That's even closer to "regular weekly/monthly delivery" numbers than a large or special shipment.

sparrish 5y ago

It could have been stolen, as the FBI suggests. Or it had been sitting in a sea port warehouse for 7 years. As it is hygroscopic and readily absorbs moisture from the atmosphere, it may be that the shipment had broken down over that time and only 20% of its explosive energy remained.

aurizon 5y ago
They normally ship in heavy plastic bags. There is a little water vapor transmission, but not enough to seriously degrade the Ammonium Nitrate - except for tears/punctures etc. One press release commented about damaged cargo. My guess is the local terrorists used it as an explosives bank. Being a customs port, it should all the watched/counted, but beirut is one of the most corrupt countries on earth = easy to steal/import anything. Now you know how Hezbollah gats their stuff, as I am sure Israel knows and monitors well.
- ficklepickle 5y ago
  The bags were torn. They couldn't even give the stuff away, and not for lack of trying.
  - aurizon 5y ago
    I feel this material was intentionally stranded in this customs purdah for the purpose of providing explosives to terrorists and over the years ~~four-fifths of it was removed from a supposedly secure customs enclave. The explosion was so intense that it was all detonated - it is possible a small amount was scattered, but no significant residual unexploded Ammonium Nitrate was found.
oivey 5y ago
I’m sure they considered that. It’s rather obvious, and the degradation of the material was openly reported in the news at the time.

tpmx 5y ago

> Many officials in Lebanon have previously said in private they believe a lot of the shipment was stolen. This seems plausible. If so, this would be one of those few times where lawlessness/corruption/incompetence kinda paid off. Imagine the damage to Beirut if there had been 5x more ammonium nitrate to blow up... (Of course, it was the same kind of general governmental incompetence that caused the ammonium nitrate to be stored there to begin with.)

londons_explore 5y ago
Unless the fire and explosion was deliberate to cover up the fact it had mostly all been stolen... And maybe the explosion turned out much larger than the thieves expected...
- eloff 5y ago
  That's plausible. Never underestimate greed and the desire to avoid being caught for a crime.
  - bogomipz 5y ago
    No. While it is "possible" it is certainly not "plausible." Please explain why if you were trying to divert attention away from a stolen good such as fertilizer you would engage in a criminal act on such a scale as to get the world to focus on the very thing you would like to draw attention away from?
    - eloff 5y ago
      If you felt your theft would be discovered, you could very easily expect the explosion would destroy all traces of the theft and nobody would know any better. Many people, especially uneducated people, would not have expected that the theft would be detectable by the size of the explosion. I'm pretty smart and well educated, but I'm not even sure such a thing would have occurred to me, and even if it did I might have preferred my odds taking my chances on that anyway. To be very clear though, I wouldn't have done something so heinous in the first place. Given the sequence events, with the welding going on etc, I don't think this happened. But not for the reasoning you gave.

wwwhizz 5y ago

I'm not American, and I am genuinely curious, why does the FBI investigate this? I can imagine the US government wanting an investigation in cases like this, and I can understand Beirut wanting (or maybe just allowing) different countries to investigate, but isn't foreign investigations a job of the CIA (or, at least, not the FBI)?

bogomipz 5y ago
One of the remits of the FBI is to protect the US from terrorist attacks. And as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Oklahoma City bombings were fertilizer-based this likely would have fallen into their purview. The CIA is supposed to be concerned only with intelligence-gathering. The FBI has offices around the world. See: https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/international-operations https://www.fbi.gov/about/leadership-and-structure/internati...
jdavis703 5y ago
The CIA doesn’t really do these kinds of investigations. To be honest I would’ve expected ATF (they specialize in investigating explosions in the US) to have been the US agency lending technical assistance.
rickeydidio 5y ago
I am American and this was my first thought when reading the headline. “Why is the FBI involved?” I can understand the CIA, like you said. So weird but a sign of our times.
- refulgentis 5y ago
  When you hear CIA think intelligence (as in espionage), when you hear FBI think investigation, never failed me
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    When I hear CIA, I think coercion to collect information, most usually information to be used to coerce somebody else. When I hear FBI I think coercion to instigate what will be well-publicized conspiratorial crime. Actual espionage and investigation are decidedly secondary activities. They have been that way from the start.

citizenpaul 5y ago

How to get your bomb materials through shipping customs and international regulations. Have a ship loaded with explosives come to port. Openly report it as illegal. Levy fines and fees to someone that you know will reject paying them. Declare the ship unsafe to leave unless it is repaired by the same people that refuse to pay the fees. Do nothing. Now you have a legal bomb supply station.

CPLX 5y ago
I mean it’s a theory, but ammonium nitrate is an incredibly common farming input. At the nation state level especially I don’t think you’d need to concoct a complicated scheme to get your hands on it.
- ipnon 5y ago
  But Hamas, ISIS, FSA, Hezbollah, cannot simply park their bomb materials in a well-functioning port. No, they would need some sort of semi-failed state, in a big city with many places to hide, yes ... and one sharing a flimsy border with a warzone like Syria. And once the materials enter the warzone, they effectively disappear, and could reappear anywhere in the region. Where on the map could we find such a port?
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  I read this as another group, not a nation state, wanting and stealing the ammonium nitrate. Most of it was stolen before the blast — terrorist groups? Low-level thugs? Who knows, but you’re right that a nation state doesn’t need to steal it in this way. That’s why it points to other parties. It may be incredibly common but not in the quantity that was stolen.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Must take in mind that the stuff also decomposes spontaneously. If stored for many months in bad conditions of conservation some amount just would go silently to the air in form of water vapor and laughing gas.
- 5y ago

firstSpeaker 5y ago

Level oc corruption in Lebanon is unbelievable. Every government worker that has the right to approve something has at least two counter signer that need to approve or sign the same thing, still there is wild corruption running through the country.

spoonjim 5y ago
It’s only a few countries where rampant corruption is the exception and not the rule — the US is one such country but many Americans don’t recognize this because they have no comparison reference.
- jbverschoor 5y ago
  The EU is just as bad.. my mic was cut of when I asked a couple of questions. Afterwards they said I couldn’t ask those kinds of question or they’ll all end up in jail.
  - dnh44 5y ago
    Care to share where you were when your mic was cut and what your questions were?
    - jbverschoor 5y ago
      At the EUIPO in Brussels & Alicante.. And the lobbying by Amazon is simply disgusting to see. The EU officials sucking up to the representatives of Amazon.
      - dnh44 5y ago
        That's really depressing and I sort of wish I hadn't asked now but thank you for sharing.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    The EU is a big place. Was this France or Bulgaria?

Hacktrick 5y ago

Imagine if the full 2,754 tons exploded.

robotnikman 5y ago
The Halifax explosion of 1917 would give you a good idea of what it would have looked like

jvdvegt 5y ago

Without paywall: https://archive.is/LsTS5 https://archive.is/LsTS5

lgats 5y ago
Using CloudFlare DNS / WARP I am never able to pass the captcha on archive.is
- opheliate 5y ago
  There have always been issues with Cloudflare's DNS and archive.is, IIRC it's because Cloudflare don't pass on some information that the operators of archive.is think they should. Unfortunate, but both parties perceive it as something the other should fix. https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/18227 https://community.cloudflare.com/t/archive-is-error-1001/182... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1017902875949793285 https://twitter.com/archiveis/status/1017902875949793285

dredmorbius 5y ago

Forensic Architecture's investigation released about 8 months ago used blast modeling to estimate that "as little as half of the 2,700 tons" exploded. The FBI's estimate cuts that estimate by about half. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-explosion https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-... Discussed on HN at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25149177 There was speculation at the time (including some by myself) as to what could account for the reduced yield relative to the total initial shipment quantity.

erdewit 5y ago

> FBI say blast consistent with 552 tonnes of chemicals Seems unlikely that this estimate can have three digits of precision, which begs the question what the real margin of error is.

ThePadawan 5y ago
I actually don't find this to be unreasonably precise. I saw a video that showed how the blast was captured on around a dozen independent devices (smartphones, surveillance cameras) and how that data could be used to reconstruct a very good 3D capture of the blast and resulting smoke cloud. If the FBI spent X hours of simulation time to reproduce the 3D results captured on those videos, they might get it down to that precision (and who knows, maybe they just ran a lot of renders and 552 was the one that looked most right, while anything between 538 and 564 was also fine).
loufe 5y ago
Agreed, it does beg the question. Three digits of precision does not mean there isn't an error of +- 100 tonnes on the actual source calculation. I can imagine an engineer in the FBI did some modeling using damage radius, height of blast, etc. to get a rough estimate. News, being news, cuts off the error or the FBI, trying to look very competent, omits the error.
amelius 5y ago
Significant digits isn't always the best way to denote a number and its accuracy. If a simulation says 552 +/- 100, then how would you write down the fact that the expectation is centered around 552 and there is an error of 100, using a single number?
- contravariant 5y ago
  The best you can do with a single number would be something like 6·10^2 tons, you also use 6 hectotons or 0.6 gigagram though people might find those a bit weird. Or you could just denote its accuracy, which the original source likely does, but which news article inevitably fail to include (and subsequently fail to adjust the number of significant digits).

p5a0u9l 5y ago

Is anyone else nervous About keeping that much explosive material on hand may Be more sinister than run-of-the-mill incompetence and bureaucracy? Like, this is a perfect opportunity to slowly sell large amounts of a regulated material, ammonium nitrate, on the black market? I usually guard against conspiratorial Explanations when mere incompetence will suffice. But this does speak to two compelling explanatory narratives. First why in the world other than the reported bureaucracy would they keep that much just laying around. Second slowly selling over time explains the missing material from the FBI estimate.

zahma 5y ago

I wonder how much of that nitrate is in Hezbollah’s hands and therefore accessible to Iran? Might very well have had some of our own troops or allies killed by bombs made with the missing nitrate. Foreign aid payments have been shown to be subject to avarice and corruption, and so the trend is to fund specific projects with deliverables and measurable success rates. There’s no reason we should be sending this stuff to a country like Lebanon given the political climate in that country for the better part or seven decades.

jorblumesea 5y ago
Nation states have no problem securing the raw precursors for explosives. The idea that Iran need some complex scheme is a little far fetched. Hezbollah, perhaps.

anonu 5y ago

August 4 will mark 1 year since this explosion. Lebanon has continued to devolve into an abyss of financial ruin (90% of savings have been wiped out by hyper-inflation), government incompetence (no government or even an inkling of one forming anytime soon), rolling blackouts (lebanons electrical capacity is 900GW with a peak demand of 3000GW - the gap is insurmountable in any reasonable amount of time), the international community has given up giving Lebanon any aid. Where did the rest of AN go? I am pretty sure Hezbollah knows the answer.

CyberRage 5y ago
When you let a terror organization run your country... it doesn't work

tobmlt 5y ago

First you steal the ammonium nitrate, but he sure to leave behind enough to blow up all the evidence (except that which may be deduced by dimensional analysis, if you are GI Taylor ;) Edit: Sorry I simply meant to be imaginative. I didn’t realize there was a conspiracy theory along these lines. I just like the GI Taylor story.

cheaprentalyeti 5y ago

It wasn't stolen. It was "stolen" in the process of being supplied to Hezbollah with plausible deniability by Russia.