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Catastrophic Beirut explosion

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday an enormously large and destructive explosion occurred in Beirut, and no one is yet certain what caused it or how many people it killed. What is known is certainly bad, and probably will get worse as time goes on and the damage is assessed.

Initial reports are that a huge quantity of ammonium nitrate were stored in the port and exploded. Here’s a Times of Israel article on that, and here’s another. From the latter:

The scale of the damage — from the epicenter of the explosion at the port of Beirut to the windows blown out kilometers (miles) away — resembles other blasts involving the chemical compound commonly used as an agricultural fertilizer.

But the compound itself typically doesn’t detonate on its own and requires another ignition source. That likely came from a fire that engulfed what initially appeared to be fireworks that were stored at the port.

So it was a chain of events, compounded by the storage of potentially dangerous substances in a highly populated area? More:

Online videos of the disaster’s initial moments show sparks and lights inside the smoke rising from the blaze, just prior to the massive blast. That likely indicates that fireworks were involved, said Boaz Hayoun, owner of the Tamar Group, an Israeli firm that works closely with the Israeli government on safety and certification issues involving explosives.

I have no doubt that other theories will be entertained.

The death toll is likely to rise well into several hundreds, with many more injured and immense property damage.

Also:

What initially started the fire at the port remains unclear. Beirut was sunny before Tuesday’s explosion, with a daily high of 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit).

Lebanese Interior Minister Mohammed Fahmi, in comments to a local TV station, made no mention of ignited fireworks but said it appeared the blast was caused by the detonation of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a warehouse at the dock ever since it was confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014.

Based on the timeline and the size of the cargo, that ship could be the MV Rhosus. The ship was initially seized in Beirut in 2013 when it entered the port due to technical problems, according to lawyers involved in the case. It came from the nation of Georgia, and had been bound for Mozambique.

“Owing to the risks associated with retaining the ammonium nitrate on board the vessel, the port authorities discharged the cargo onto the port’s warehouses,” the lawyers wrote in a 2015 article published by shiparrested.com. “The vessel and cargo remain to date in port awaiting auctioning and/or proper disposal.”

If all of this is true – and at the moment I believe it is – what a massive failure on the part of authorities to prevent a foreseeable catastrophe.

Comments

Catastrophic Beirut explosion — 37 Comments

  1. As I posted on another thread here, one source of this explosion could be the Hezbollah munitions that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a 2018 UN speech were being manufactured/stored at the port or, it could be the 2,750 tons of Ammonium Nitrate that were offloaded from a derelict freighter and likely left stored in a warehouse there, or perhaps it was one cache of explosive material exploding, and setting the other cache of nearby explosive material off a few seconds later.

    Whatever it was, if you look at the videos of this explosion—mushroom cloud and, then, overpressure wavefront and all—it was quite remarkable, quite terrifying, and quite deadly.

    By one recent count over 100 dead, 4,000 injured (a lot apparently from flying shards of glass and other flying objects).

  3. P.S.–I have read several comments from individuals over the years lamenting the fact that, at one time in the past–perhaps prior to their Civil War, which ran from 1975 to 1990–and in contrast to the rest of the countries in the Middle East, Lebanon had been an up and coming, relatively peaceful, modern, and multicultural society, and not what it has become.

    This disaster just another body blow to that unfortunate country.

  5. If I were the Israelis, and I knew Hezbollah was manufacturing munitions at that port, and I knew 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate was in a warehouse at that port… the ops directive, frankly, writes itself.

  7. Kate’s link is most clarifying. One clearly sees multiple fireworks set off by the initial (not small) fire, then the catastrophic explosion.
    The amount of ammonium nitrate bizarrely stored in Beirut’s harbor (for years!?!) is almost equal to the Texas City amount. Both were ~10% of the explosive energy released at Nagasaki.
    The disunity and strife in Lebanon since 1975 is an example of a country committing suicide. This is surely a crowning blow. Wonder what Hezbollah will do now.
    What we must not do is send money. Trump’s response is limited and correct.

  8. Snow on Pine:
    perhaps prior to their Civil War, which ran from 1975 to 1990–and in contrast to the rest of the countries in the Middle East, Lebanon had been an up and coming, relatively peaceful, modern, and multicultural society,

    I have known a fair amount of people of Lebanese background in the US and in Latin America. They have been professionals and entrepreneurs. Very competent people. I am reminded of the people of Greek extraction I have known in the US. I wonder if some of the problems that Lebanon has been having are related to the diaspora to the Americas- a critique I have seen applied to Greece, Ireland and Scotland- the cream left.

    Independent of the diaspora, hosting the Palestinians hasn’t helped, as the Palestinians brought much of their conflicts with them to Lebanon- and the Lebanese got caught up in those conflicts.

  9. Snow on Pine; Gringo:

    I well remember pre-civil-war Lebanon. It was the model country in the Middle East, doing relatively well.

    It also had a population that was relatively evenly divided between Muslims and Christians. After 1975, the majority of the people who left were Christians. See this. Excerpt:

    It is believed that there has been a decline in the ratio of Christians to Muslims over the past 60 years, due to higher emigration rates of Christians, and a higher birth rate in the Muslim population. When the last census was held in 1932, Christians made up 53% of Lebanon’s population. In 1956, it was estimated that the population was 54% Christian and 44% Muslim.

    A demographic study conducted by the research firm Statistics Lebanon found that approximately 27% of the population was Sunni, 27% Shia, 21% Maronite, 8% Greek Orthodox, 5% Druze, 5% Melkite, and 1% Protestant, with the remaining 6% mostly belonging to smaller non-native to Lebanon Christian denominations.

    So at this point it’s estimated to be about one-third Christian, mostly Maronite.

  11. Some time back, I saw a compendium of photographs from Beirut, Teheran and even Kabul. Fifties, maybe. Women in sophisticated western dress, at work in dresses and heels, no face coverings.
    Like to find out how many women today really, really appreciate their new styles.

  12. If the Israelis didn’t blow it up, they ought to have done so.

    But could easily have been Arab Stupidity (tautology alert). Mean IQ in Egypt and Saudi Arabia is 77. Possibly a bit higher in the Levant since not everyone there is precisely an Arab. Taleb is obsessed with the idea that he’s a Phoenician 😛

    But plenty of them are not the sharpest tools in the drawer — especially the kind of first generation off the farm fellaheen who would be expected to be working on the docks and in warehouses.

    Government stupidity, stupid dock workers, corruption, the fact that each ethno-religious group runs its own state within a state… who knows? Are the docks a Shia / Hezbollah enclave? Did they keep all that ammonium nitrate lying around for their own nefarious purposes? If so, is there an Arabic equivalent of ‘Petard’? Do I know? Do I even care? Honestly, no.

    Sucks for any normal residents trying to live normal lives, it goes without saying.

    Still, anything keeps things in Lebanon chaotic and fluid is probably all to the good for the wider world.

  13. @Richard Aubrey:

    Those were the urban, cosmopolitan elites. Meanwhile out in the countryside the Fellaheen lived as they always did, spurned by the city people (their absentee landlords often) and hating them in return.

    Along comes the Ford Foundation, Peace Corps, all the other do-gooders to build hospitals in the countryside, smack down infant mortality, etc… Guess who out-bred who?

    Wait 1 or 2 generations, Game Over. Did for the Shah, Doing for Ataturk’s Turkey, Done 55.76 times over for Kabul. And coming soon to plenty more places hopefully not near you or me.

    Demographics is Destiny.

    Added to this there could be encyclopedias of text written about the psychosexual stresses caused by rural development and urbanization and the insane tidal waves of fury and cultural/religious reaction these can release.

    It’s very difficult to modernize a country rapidly without repressing and/or killing a lot of people. If you don’t do it, they’re just as likely to kill you. I’m no Hari Seldon, but still surprises me how few politicians, development ‘experts’, etc. seem to grasp these pretty obvious observable things.

  14. “Are the docks a Shia / Hezbollah enclave? Did they keep all that ammonium nitrate lying around for their own nefarious purposes?” – Zaphod

    I had been wondering the same thing, as that was confiscated back in 2014.
    It could at least have been distributed or sold for fertilizer! (I wonder what the justification for confiscation was.) From the news stories, some people had been pleading for authorities to move the fertilizer, without success.

    No excuse for the idiocy — fireworks stored next to explosives! — and some heads will roll, but probably not the higher-ups actually responsible.

  15. It sounds to me like the result of the incompetence caused partly by the culture and partly by the ongoing political turmoil. Nobody took responsibility to sell the fertilizer or otherwise dispose of it. So there it sat, slowly giving off gasses which could set off an explosion if there were a fire.

  16. Zaphod may have called it.
    https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/08/05/hezbollah-hoarded-fertilizer-planned-to-use-it-against-israel-in-nuclear-style-attack-n2573756

    Hezbollah kept three metric tons of ammonium nitrate, the explosive thought to be behind the mega blast in Beirut this week, in a storehouse in London, until MI5 and the London Metropolitan Police found it in 2015.

    The Lebanese terrorist group also stored hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate in southern Germany, which were uncovered earlier this year.

    The Iran-backed terrorists kept the explosive in thousands of ice packs in four properties in northwest London, according to a report in The Telegraph last year. The ice pack deception tactic was used in Germany, as well.
    …
    Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened in the past to destroy Israel by causing a massive explosion in the port of Haifa using ammonia tanks that he said would be like a “nuclear” explosion. In addition Hezbollah allegedly sought to acquire ammonium nitrate via Syria since 2009 and tried to infiltrate the agriculture ministry in Lebanon to do so, according to leaked diplomatic cables.
    …
    Hezbollah has a significant arsenal of explosives, missiles, ammunition and more stored in populated areas across the country, including in Beirut.

    A July report by the ALMA Research and Education Center found that the group has at least 28 missile launching sites, command and control infrastructure, missile assembly sites, rocket fuel storage sites and missile bunkers next to high schools, clinics, hospitals, golf clubs and soccer fields as well as the Iranian Embassy and the Lebanese Ministry of Defense.

  17. Poor Hezbullah. What a waste of perfectly fine explosive material….
    …which could have been put to such better uses.

    No, it’s not all peaches and cream these days for Obama’s pals in Beirut (and beyond).

    Things are tough (and Trump—of course—should be blamed).

    But don’t count them out yet. Improvisation is the spice of life and necessity the mother of invention:
    http://jewishworldreview.com/0820/Hezbollah_amphetamines.php3
    (H/T Powerline blog)

    No doubt another cogent reason for the informed electorate to vote for Biden in November….

  18. yeah…Fireworks or RPG and small arms ammunition along with the Ammonium Nitrate?
    I mean, come on; it’s Beirut.

  19. @Barry Meislin:

    Be interesting to know a bit about the precursor ingredients and where they come from. If I had to hazard a guess, would be asking questions of a very large, extremely inscrutable, jaundiced-looking bear with its head firmly jammed up its… honey jar. Lot of nefarious China-Iran doings.

    Funny how things take on a life of their own when the kind of cash flows associated with drugs are involved; the article mentions that Hezbollah drug operatives are not averse to working with Christian and Jewish gangsters to get the business done. What a convoluted world we live in. Oops… gotta go, I’ve got Purdue Pharma on Line 3 😀

  20. @Harry:

    Fireworks are banned in Hong Kong. This dates back to the Cultural Revolution when insurgents were blowing up people with ‘fireworks’ for plausible deniability when caught in the act.

    Heaven help anyone caught with fireworks in urban areas: the penalties are severe.

    But go out into the New Territories where the traditional villagers live largely Without the Law and all bets are off. Go hiking around Chinese New Year and it’s like Sarajevo during the Siege. I was there taking incoming with Hillary, don’t you know?

    Now the Chinese are mostly sane and not given to Low IQ stupidity like firing off AK-47’s to celebrate the birth of a new goat, but still tend to have some unfortunate accidents due to misplaced enthusiasm around the stuff which goes boom. Arabs? How lucky do you feel? 😛

    I mean, why couldn’t they have it all? Ammonium Nitrate, leaking oil drums, small arms ammo, various types of anti-tank rockets, RPGs, *and* fireworks? Go big or go home!

  21. Some good videos here, in addition to the main topic.
    https://www.redstate.com/streiff/2020/08/05/media-fact-checkers-beclown-themselves-debunking-a-single-tweet-about-a-nuke-exploding-in-beirut/

    This is the kind of nonsense the whole “fact-checking” culture in the media has spawned. You have people with no identifiable expertise in explosions, nuclear or otherwise, fact-checking rumors that no sane person voiced. The best spin you can put on this is that the reporters were the victims of some kind of newsroom practical joke or lost a bet. The most likely explanation is that they decided to try to create a narrative that a lot of people…surely, not people like them…were such rubes that they’d fall for any online rumor and therefore validate the need for corporate censorship.

    Some days I weep for our nation.

    Days like yesterday when proud heirs to the tradition of Walter Duranty and Stephen Glass and Janet Cooke are reduced to debunking a story that was never really “bunked” to begin with.

  22. “… not averse…”

    Indeed, the dark drug trade does have a tendency to unite people of all faiths, creeds and backgrounds. Truly inspiring…
    (All together now: “We are the World”!!)

    “…where they come from…”
    IIRC, reports have said the Republic of Georgia, shipped by a Russian businessman, destination Brazil. The freighter developed—I guess the word these days is—“issues” and had to dock in Beirut. Ship’s cargo inspected, ship detained, crew arrested, and except for a couple of them, later released.
    Russian “businessman” declared bankruptcy and thus (conveniently) couldn’t free the ship or pay the crew. I think the ship was still docked in Beirut.
    Cargo impounded in a Beirut port warehouse (conveniently?—Perhaps it’s Hezbullah’s version of “Never let a crisis go to waste”…)

  23. But don’t worry. The Lebanese government is going to get to the bottom of it and punish those responsible. (Themselves, surely…. Alas, somewhere Orwell is chuckling; or he would be had he a sense of humour.)

  24. “some heads will roll, but probably not the higher-ups actually responsible.” – AesopFan

    https://hotair.com/archives/ed-morrissey/2020/08/05/not-usual-suspect-lebanon-arrests-port-officials-negligence-leading-devastating-blast/

    The storage began six years ago, after offloading the material from an “ailing” Russian-owned cargo ship, the New York Times reports this morning. However, the general manager of the Beirut port told a local news station that they have repeatedly petitioned to have the ammonium nitrate removed from the dock. It’s the government that failed to act, Hassan Koraytem insisted:
    …
    In other words, the mass arrest of port officials might just be a distraction from where the blame really lies. Although, this history doesn’t address one other point — why did port officials allow fireworks to be stored so close to the obviously dangerous ammonium nitrate storage area? That seems like a negligent decision too, if that’s what happened. That one might be on the port officials themselves.

    Hopefully the residents of Beirut will get real answers to all of these questions.

  28. Barry Meislin on August 6, 2020 at 3:29 am said… {snip}

    — This. It appears to be the actual info unless you’re going for the full “Israeli preventive strike” notion, which really does not jibe with Israeli behavior. They don’t typically endanger innocent people when they don’t have to.

    This was clearly a pretty insane amount of explosives to generate the shock wave it visibly created.

    I hate to use CBS, but this offers two views of the explosion and you can see how someone claimed “nuclear” if they actually did not really grasp how nuclear works.

    People tend to assume “mushroom cloud”==nuclear, even though it’s an effect of size, not source.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/video/blast-of-highly-explosive-material-kills-dozens-injures-thousands-in-beirut-lebanon/#x

  29. Why is anyone assuming it was fireworks that set everything off? Hezbollah is stupid enough to stack the Ammonium Nitrate around the walls to hide the goings on inside, while they welded up rockets, IEDs and other weapons inside. The docks would be handy to move stuff further down the coast.

  30. Well, the posted links with video and satellite imagery make the sequence of events rather clear — fire, fireworks going off, then BOOM from the next warehouse.

  32. “Why is anyone assuming…”

    Absolutely true. This cannot be stressed enough.

    There is NO REASON—absolutely no reason—to believe ANYTHING that emanates from there. Not at first, in any event.
    Not until after quite a bit of time has passed.
    Perhaps not even until many years after the dust has settled.
    (I.e., the “Three Day Rule” expanded to a much longer period.)

    The article I quoted in my “10:25 am” post above states that Hezbullah (using, no doubt, technology provided by Iran) is able to convert ammonium nitrate, or whatever it was, to rocket/missile fuel. The writer of that article (Ehud Ya’ari) is one of Israel’s topmost (if not THE topmost) military/security analysts.

    And Hezbullah IS rockets. It has more rockets and missiles than almost every other country in the world. ALL of them are facing south (except the ones in South Lebanon facing east (or even NE) towards Israel’s “panhandle” and Mt. Hermon, in Israel’s northeast).
    – – – – – – – –
    Which brings us to another consideration/speculation (see AesopFan at 3:22 am):

    Rather “convenient” this story of a derelict , rogue, leaky-tub-of-a-freighter just somehow—“unintentionally”, “accidentally”, by a “curious” sequence of events—dropping off all this ammonium nitrate in Beirut of all places.

    (Not bad as far as “drop shipment” stories go, actually.)

    Let’s see:
    Tub inoperable (and trying to get to Brazil??!!).
    Owner unable/unwilling to repair ship so that it can continue to its “original destination”.
    Owner declares bankruptcy.
    Ship and (most importantly) potentially explosive cargo off-shored in Beirut.
    Potentially explosive cargo NOT “taken care of” (that is, not removed from the port warehouse/s) despite the alleged series of complaints made by govt. authorities regarding its volatility and potential destructiveness.
    Hezbullah higher up (no less than Nasr’allah’s brother-in-law) in charge of the port.

    Yep, quite a “coincidental” sequence of events.
    (On the other hand, it could be all legit, I guess….)
    – – – – – – – –
    Finally, regarding OBloodyHell’s post of 1:17 pm:
    Israel (and, more likely, the entire region) may well have dodged a huge bullet here.
    Had it received intelligence that to safeguard Israel’s security, there was something absolutely essential in Beirut port that needed to be “taken out”, it is entirely possible—perhaps almost CERTAIN—-that this would have been done, even though I don’t believe (though I could be wrong about this) that Israel has bombed areas of Beirut since the end of the second Lebanon War, in 2006.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Lebanon_War

    Had there been an overriding reason for this attack to be made, and had the Israeli intelligence services NOT known about the ammonium nitrate stockpiled in the port warehouse for the last six/seven years, then Israel would certainly have been blamed for causing this massive carnage, and it would have been almost impossible for Israel to offer a convincing excuse why it wasn’t responsible.

    (On the other hand, it is entirely possible—perhaps even CERTAIN—that Israeli intelligence was very much aware of the ammonium nitrate in the port.)

    Still….

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