Forest

Canaltia wrote:

Yeah, just saw some videos of that. Crazy stuff. No cause stated yet, but a death toll of 25 and 2,500 injured minimum. At this point, I'm just hoping it was an innocent accident that set it off, because we really don't want, or need, terrorist attacks or wars breaking out.

On a much lighter tone, yesterday I found out that jalapeno peppers are actually not that expensive. You can get a kilogram of them for less than $9.00 Canadian. And you can do so much with a kilogram of jalapeno peppers. So my recommendation is to support your local economy by buying freshly grown jalapeno peppers, because they're far too cheap to justify not having a lot of them.

As if 2020 could get any worse.

Middle Barael wrote:

...No doubt Hezbollah is behind the attacks, since in just a few days the verdict of a UN trial on four Hezbollah members will be released, not to mention how Hezbollah attacked northern Israel just a few weeks ago.

From what I'm reading, it was likely gross negligence. Two reports say either ammonium nitrate or sodium nitrate was left in the port for over a year after being confiscated, and that a fire caused it to explode. Even if it was an accident though, it doesn't lessen the devastation and human loss.

Effazio wrote:

From what I'm reading, it was likely gross negligence. Two reports say either ammonium nitrate or sodium nitrate was left in the port for over a year after being confiscated, and that a fire caused it to explode. Even if it was an accident though, it doesn't lessen the devastation and human loss.

Yeah, I've been seeing the same thing. Now it seems really anyone is behind it, or that it was intentional. Hezbollah, Iran, and Israel have all denied involvement, and Israel and Iran have both offered humanitarian aid.

Effazio wrote:

From what I'm reading, it was likely gross negligence. Two reports say either ammonium nitrate or sodium nitrate was left in the port for over a year after being confiscated, and that a fire caused it to explode. Even if it was an accident though, it doesn't lessen the devastation and human loss.

That's what it's looking like currently, from the news. If it was an NH4NO3 blast triggered by a fire, that brings to mind the devastation of the Texas City blasts in 1947. If what President Aoun mentioned as a possibility proves true - that a warehouse containing 2,750 tonnes (3031 tons) of NH4NO3 is what blew up, we sadly need to be ready for the death toll to climb even higher than the 70 it's at right now. An industrial accident is in some ways "better" than a deliberate terrorist act, from a geopolitical stability perspective, but for the victims and their families the devastation and suffering are the same. In this disaster, let's hope that everybody can put aside their differences for a bit and help those who were affected to recover, to mourn, and to rebuild.

Verdant Haven wrote:

That's what it's looking like currently, from the news. If it was an NH4NO3 blast triggered by a fire, that brings to mind the devastation of the Texas City blasts in 1947. If what President Aoun mentioned as a possibility proves true - that a warehouse containing 2,750 tonnes (3031 tons) of NH4NO3 is what blew up, we sadly need to be ready for the death toll to climb even higher than the 70 it's at right now. An industrial accident is in some ways "better" than a deliberate terrorist act, from a geopolitical stability perspective, but for the victims and their families the devastation and suffering are the same. In this disaster, let's hope that everybody can put aside their differences for a bit and help those who were affected to recover, to mourn, and to rebuild.

Yes, I am heartbroken. It was such a devastating explosion.

Even holidaymakers in Cyprus heard the blast (around 190 km away, according to my Google Earth ruler measurement 0.o) and seismographs recorded it as an earthquake of magnitude 3.3. Let that sink in. I cannot imagine the impact that the explosion had in Beirut. I just hope it wasn't some terrorist organization that executed a planned attack like this. Not that it would change the death toll, but as you said, I don't wanna think about its political implications.

I have been looking around on Google Earth, trying to match the port area (as seen in October 2019) to the rubble we see today. It is so sad. It seems the ammonium nitrate was in what is called Beirut Port Silos, and that is the white building that exploded :(

https://earth.google.com/web/@33.90132511,35.51842498,1.64204304a,1626.57369948d,15y,-8.55813285h,8.45150525t,0r

Ruinenlust wrote:

In a stream-of-consciousness way, since I have to do stuff IRL in a minute:

Rule by the communist party; lack of democracy; terrible environmental regulations; Hong Kong is dying; rapidly aging population without having first quite acquired First World wealth to fund such a transition; far too many cities that are far too populous; encroaching Gobi Desert; melting Tibetan glaciers; social and political oppression of Tibetans, Uighurs, and many other minority groups; dictatorial leadership of Xi that is likely for life; lack of open information due to censorship; rapid overdevelopment of the landscape with massive infrastructure projects that have destroyed much of the environment; perennial massive floods along major rivers despite all of the awful dams; rare Earth metal extraction that is terribly polluting; crazy levels of surveillance; etc.

At least so I've heard. I've never been there, actually, and I don't intend on going, either. I'll stay in North America, lol. :-)

China's actually been pretty good, environmentally speaking, in recent years. However the nature of non-accountable government is that while they can instigate environmental measures on a whim they can also wreck the environment on a whim. In the long term, its not the most sustainable system for environmentalism.

I'd agree though that lack of government transparency is a problem. In fact, it's also the thing which hides all the problems we don't know about, and it'd be naive to think that the horrifying human rights abuses and corrupt actions of the powerful are anything more than the tip of a huge and hidden iceberg of state malfeasance.

For its wrongdoings, it is accountability in the USA that allows the government to have made progress. While Western democracies have got a long way to go, they've also come a long way, and that's because of accountability.

Hello from the UDS: Embassy update for July is here!

Frieden-und Freudenland wrote:

Yes, I am heartbroken. It was such a devastating explosion.

I have been looking around on Google Earth, trying to match the port area (as seen in October 2019) to the rubble we see today. It is so sad. It seems the ammonium nitrate was in what is called Beirut Port Silos, and that is the white building that exploded :(

https://earth.google.com/web/@33.90132511,35.51842498,1.64204304a,1626.57369948d,15y,-8.55813285h,8.45150525t,0r

That definitely is the building :-/ The BBC article has a clip with a couple of videos of the explosion (since the building was on fire first, people were filming from multiple perspectives at long distance). It looks like the detonation occurred initially in the 7th and 8th columns of the silo, with the building acting to provide the containment that makes turns an ammonium nitrate fire into an explosive. The explosion blew out the top, followed a split second later by the north end, and a split second after that, the sound end. We can only hope that since the initial direction of the blast was to the north (towards the water), that more of the effects were directed harmlessly out to see. Had it been the other way around, I'm guessing it would even worse.

To provide a more recent connection than the 1947 Texas City explosions... for those who remember the Oklahoma City bombing, that blast was the equivalent of around 5000lbs of TNT. If the quantity given by President Aoun is correct, and it all detonated, this one was the equivalent of 2,546,040lbs of TNT, or 1.27 kilotons - more than 500 times larger, and on the scale of some tactical nuclear weapons that are still in service to this day.

The videos are really horridly visceral. They're in the distance, you don't see any injuries or anything like that, but the raw power behind it is bigger than even the detonations of refineries that are perhaps the closest non-military equivalent I've seen.

-edit-
I've now seen a couple of much closer perspectives. Some of the buildings in the surrounding neighborhood practically disintegrated. I'm done for the evening. Oi :-/

I finally finished putting together my August environmental agenda. It is here:

Mozworld, I would appreciate it if you would pin it! Ambassadors, please disseminate it. Thank you!

This explosion in Beirut was unbelievably large. It's amazing that that amount of material was stored in the middle of a populated area. Those substances ought to only be stored in secure locations, far away from fragile infrastructure and people, and never in those quantities that would detonate to that extent.

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Also, new from America: a truly bonkers 37 minute interview between AXIOS media and Donald Trump. This is like a parody of what a government would be. This could have been an involved, in-depth skit in a comedy production from one or two decades ago. It's unreal that this is what is actually going on. It gets hysterically funny (and tragic, but you have to laugh otherwise you'll cry) around 14:00, when he produces these charts and papers. It's just...oh dear. O__O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaaTZkqsaxY