I thought it was bad enough to store that much potential explosive, but to put it with fireworks and detonation cord as well...
Beirut Port Explosion
21–30 of 226 posts
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#22This is incredible and I can only imagine how much time this took to create. Definitely also worth taking a look at their previous investigations at https://forensic-architecture.org/ .
There's a wealth of great investigative work there. Really impressive stuff.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#23Very well done video, however they avoided the controversial issues of the explosion.
Everywhere in Lebanon, people reported seeing and hearing jets flying and even some videos show flying objects. They also never touched on what might have triggered the fire to begin with or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#24Very well done video, however they avoided the controversial issues of the explosion. Everywhere in Lebanon, people reported seeing and hearing jets flying and even some videos show flying objects. They also never touched on what might have triggered the fire to begin with or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there.
or whether there was a possibility of a weapons cache being hidden there
I disagree, they show that the colour of the smoke and the different burn zones/phases is consistent with the declared contents of the warehouse. Anything further than that would be idle speculation.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#25Here is an article about how the ammonium nitrate ended up there in the first place: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/05/beirut-blast-traci... Here is an article about the history of ammonium nitrate: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/deadly-hi... (comment edited)
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#26In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services.
Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.
Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”
More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.
A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]
Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.
This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.
I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.
Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphi...
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#27This was amazing to watch. Highly recommended. I do start to wonder if any of such materials are stored like this in one of our ports, such as Rotterdam, The Netherlands. I can't imagine such a mess to exist there. But The Netherlands remembers the Firework explosion in Enschede, from 2000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster It's not nearly at the scale of Beirut, but it killed 23 people.
The BBC asked a similar question after the event: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-53755289.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#28Money quote: > Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation.
The part where they overlay Australia's recommendations for safely storing ammonium nitrate over the blast zone analysis was equally impressive to me.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#29What's the opposite of Augmented Reality? This does such a great job to overlay real-world video and photography onto a 3D simulation.
Re: Beirut Port Explosion
#30Here is an article about how the ammonium nitrate ended up there in the first place: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/05/beirut-blast-traci... Here is an article about the history of ammonium nitrate: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/deadly-hi... (comment edited)
https://www.jpost.com/international/is-hezbollahs-ammonium-n...
That link does nothing to support a claim that the ammonium nitrate in Beirut is linked to Hezbollah.