https://i.imgur.com/ySdKpPD.jpg

An alleged picture of the state of the warehouse some time before.

Looks super photobashed, to me, though. Mostly due to the shading of the bags. Feels mucho off to me.
But, have the picture anyway.

My IT career actually began as a clerk in a chemical plant that made anhydrous ammonia and ammonium nitrate among other fertilizers. Their manufacturing process coated the ammonium nitrate “prills” with an inert material to help prevent the absorption of other materials that could cause it to be explosive.

They also were very careful to store it in several separate piles...they didn’t package it, it shipped in bulk, and had procedures to insure first-in first-out to keep the inventory “fresh”. Older meant more unstable.

Smoking in the plant was a dismissal offense. Any open flame could have caused an accident. We were taught that even a burning cigarette was a risk.

Later, they began to make explosive grade AN...no inert coating, etc. I’d moved on by then.

Pretty sure the coating will erode evtl.

Not to me.
Sand/ dust storms?

Anyhow, this is pretty exactly how I imagined the whole "accidentally mislaid 7000t of ammonious nitrate in a warehouse in Beirut" thing.

And global news has picked up on "Nitroprill" - A web search that explicitely excludes the keyword Beirut leads to very few results, but it clearly existed before Aug 2020.

Well halleluja the fuel's been found and it's a stunner. Acid, wood, kerosene and tons of fireworks were housed in the very same storage unit !!!

One full story here https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...explosion.html

We already knew about the fireworks!

The point is there were no inspections and no enforcing of safety rules because all these people were in one another's pockets financially. The whole of Lebanon runs on bribery and always has done.

Agreed, hazel, though I sadly didn't know about the fireworks until recently. I did know and fully agree that one of the major problems with believing "Greed is Good" is that it often quite literally can blow up in one's face and criminally in many innocent folks' as well.

The whole (!) cabinet resigned, not sure where they're now, politically.

In humanitarian terms, it probably wasn't going to well for them last year, and wasn't getting better with COVID-19, and now this...

Sadly, it has become Yet Another Middle East Tragedy, with all the hallmarks: corruption, factions and fractions, violent protests, women crying over the bodies of dead men...