The large, windowless square structure is grain storage. It blocked some of the blast but represents a large fraction of Lebanon's grain supply.

More details from https://www.moonofalabama.org/2020/08/beirut-blast-wrap-up.html#more

-------------------------%<--------------------------------%<------------------------------ RFERL spoke with the captain of the ship that had unintentionally brought the ammonium nitrate to Lebanon. He confirms the ship's arrest. It also reports the cause of the incident:

Lebanon's LBCI-TV reported on August 5 that, according to preliminary information, the fire that set off the explosion was started accidentally by welders who were closing off a gap that allowed unauthorized entry into the warehouse.

LBCI said sparks from a welder's torch are thought to have ignited fireworks stored in a warehouse, which in turn detonated the nearby cargo of ammonium nitrate that had been unloaded from the MV Rhosus years earlier.

Independent experts say orange clouds that followed the massive blast on August 4 were likely from toxic nitrogen dioxide gas that is released after an explosion involving nitrates.

There is a short video of firefighters at the initial fire. Reportedly none survived when the fireworks fire set off the ammonium nitrate. Another video shows the initial fire caused by welding. It burns a while and then sets off fireworks in a first explosion. This takes the roof off the warehouse. A few minutes later the fireworks cause the huge explosion of the ammonium nitrate.

Reuters provides another detail:

The source said a fire had started at port warehouse 9 on Tuesday and spread to warehouse 12, where the ammonium nitrate was stored.

That the ammonium nitrate was stored for seven years was not the responsibility of the port management but was caused by some judicial quarrel:

The head of Beirut port and the head of customs both said on Wednesday that several letters were sent to the judiciary asking for the dangerous material be removed, but no action was taken.

Port General Manager Hassan Koraytem told OTV the material had been put in a warehouse on a court order, adding that they knew then the material was dangerous but “not to this degree”.

“We requested that it be re-exported but that did not happen. We leave it to the experts and those concerned to determine why,” Badri Daher, director general of Lebanese Customs, told broadcaster LBCI.

Two documents seen by Reuters showed Lebanese Customs had asked the judiciary in 2016 and 2017 to request that the “concerned maritime agency” re-export or approve the sale of the ammonium nitrate, which had been removed from cargo vessel Rhosus and deposited in warehouse 12, to ensure port safety.

That's a great question. The area is semi affluent and known for being pretty conservative.

My guess is that along with people feeling like they are personally successful they are being fed media that describes the progression of scientific understanding as "proof" that scientists who are forming recommendations don't know what they are talking about.

With this type of narrative clouding the purpose and reasons behind the recommendations these people feel like their own success makes them a better judge of what they should be doing for everyone's health and safety.

Add in a little talk about freedom and stigma of being a nerd and you have large social groups that deny the need to follow scientific recommendations that are meant to statistically reduce the broad impact of the virus' affects.

woo! woo! sing it bobby...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT8Rv6dFG5E

since y'all like to spit (then split) words...try the recitative in the middle. get the system free of bile. clear the head.

see? like a spiritual. sing to the heavens to relieve the suffering. after y'all calmed down, might help see through those clouds. a better day is coming.

when the dawn of 'bye don' arrives.

The worst DevOps mistake I ever made:

Assignment: On ~1,000 -physical- RHEL systems, change the default run level from command line to GUI (don't ask).

Solution: Hey, all our config files are controlled by Puppet, so this'll be easy!

(If you don't know what Puppet does, it enforces file configurations, so if you change a single file on the Puppetmaster, that change is pushed out to all servers running Puppet)

Ok, all I need to do it edit a single file, change a single number in said file and issue a single command: reboot. Easy-fuckin'-peasy.

The file I need to change is /etc/inittab -- this file tells a Linux system which "run level" it should initiate upon booting up. runlevel 3 is command line and runlevel 5 is a GUI like Gnome or some other tragic perversion of the whole reason you run Linux in the first place. All I had to do was change from runlevel 3 to runlevel 5. And reboot.

So simple; so stupidly simple.

So stupidly simple at 3:00am. When I hadn't slept all night. On a production network. When I'm working from home away from the office. On a Saturday when no one is in said office.

I make my change and save it, then push it to the version control system. Puppet picks it up and pushes the change to ~1,000 physical computers.

Done and done!

Remember I mentioned that I had to change a single file AND execute a single command: reboot?

Here's where things go tragically wrong.

My changes worked PERFECTLY. Everything did exactly what I told it to: Puppet changed the file, and rebooted the servers.

Only they keep rebooting. They keep rebooting over and over and over and over. I can't access any server on the network. Worse, while I'm trying to figure out WTF I did wrong, the 30 minute time-out I'd set on our alerting system, Nagios, expires.

Did I mention that I pushed this change to ~1,000 servers? ~1,000 servers that won't stop rebooting and aren't reporting into Nagios, thus being marked as down?

At 3:31am, on Saturday morning, the pages to ALL the on-call engineers began. One page per engineer per machine. About one every two seconds. And I'm getting paged, too -- except some of the pages are Nagios and some are utterly irate engineers who want to know exactly WTF is going on and I can't tell which is which because I'm getting text-spammed like crazy.

And those servers? They just keep right on rebooting.

At that point, I felt the kind of existential dread that only people who work in IT know -- the kind of dread that arises a picosecond after you've hit ENTER and realized you've type 'rm -rf /' or some-such -- because I knew at that very second exactly what I'd done wrong.

I'd typo'd "5" and made it "6" in the runlevel. And pushed it to ~1,000 -physical- servers. And then rebooted them ALL.

"So," you're asking, "Whyfor is runlevel 6 a big deal?"

Because of this:

runlevel 3: command line.
runlevel 5: GUI
runlevel 6: REBOOT THE FUCKING COMPUTER.

What I'd done was told every production server on our network to reboot as soon as it rebooted, which leads to another reboot, which leads to another reboot, lather rinse repeat.

At 3:45am on Saturday morning, I knew that every person in IT would have to drive into the office, visit every production server with a bootable USB key, change the BIOS to boot off the key, boot the server into Single User Mode, change the damned file by hand, then reboot the server. This takes about 10 minutes per server -- times ~1,000.

I learned a number of valuable lessons that day:

1. DOUBLE CHECK YOUR FUCKING WORK.
2. See lesson #1
addendum: filing for unemployment insurance in Washington state is amazingly easy.

And that was the very last time I ever worked on physical hardware. To this day, if it's not in the cloud, I ain't fucking touching it.

Here endth the lesson.

I don't know what point you're trying to make. Nothing I said was incorrect. For a gun to fire simunition, it has to have special modifications. Whether the modifications are easy or hard had nothing to do with the point I made, which is that a gun modified to fire simunition can't fire regular ammunition. So if they were using simunition, there is no chance of one of them grabbing the wrong "clip" and accidentally killing someone.

A 40mm LTL round sounds about like a pistol being fired. Here is a video I found doing a quick search.

If you watch the video again, between 23 and 24 seconds you can see a green powder cloud, which looks exactly like this 40mm marking powder grenade, which according to the manufacturer, has an effective range of 5 to 120 feet.

It also has a warning: "This product can expose you to chemicals including Lead Salts and Hexavalent Chromium, which are known to the State of California to cause cancer, and Lead Salts, which are known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm."

Breathe Deep The Fungal Clouds Of Rot

...and who is surprised that large numbers of Trumpsters were foolish enough to listen to him and drank bleach?

Drink the bleach, then flush your nose with ammonia. Don't let the liberal fake media tell you it's dangerous, they just want you to be sick so it makes Daddy Trump look bad. If you don't believe me, you can at least wash your skin with a mixture of the two....just ignore the clouds of chlorine gas, they're also a liberal hoax.

Only fools on team Trump.

Care to explain why Trump gave a no bid $55 MILLION contract for distributing n95 masks to Pantera, a subsidiary of a bankrupt defense contractor company with zero employees?...a contract that lets the company owner use the power of the federal government to buy the masks at as low as $.63, then sell them to the government for $5.50 each? Pantera provides no service for that near 1000% markup, the Fed finds/orders the masks (and probably pays for them and transfers ownership to Pantera for free), then buys them back for nearly 10 times what they cost. Care to explain how that's NOT just Trump handing millions of taxpayer dollars to a rich supporter?

Your video, Taal Ash Cloud Spawns Lightning, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Back in my day it was against parental law to contradict grownups.

HEY! YOU! Get off of my cloud of air pollution!

Almost as stupid as holding the producers of the toxic product AND the misleading or outright false information about it's hazards blameless. Because they actively misled their customers, I give them the vast lions share of blame, but maybe not 100%. There's plenty to go around.

You don't have to live in poverty to abandon fossil fuels.
Not.
Even.
Close.
I bought solar 10+- years back...it paid for itself in 8. It's lifespan is 20+-. I get 12 years of free electricity for abandoning that portion, with no blackouts, no brownouts, and no rate increases.

True, the video could be better at sharing the blame, but it stayed on topic instead, that topic being major polluters greenwashing their mage. I didn't take it as assigning ALL blame to one source, just not allowing the worst offenders to shirk all responsibility for their products.


Every one of these is the likely outcome of any anthropogenic rise over 2-3C because of feedback loops that drive us to 6-12C rise. Only the wars are likely this century, but I didn't put a timeframe on those outcomes. 140 million + will be displaced by just a 3' rise, which is all but guaranteed by 2100 under the most optimistic current projections.
That wipes out mangroves and other fish nurseries, further impacting the struggling ocean food webs. All the while it accelerates as our ability to cope erodes like the shorelines....it doesn't just halt at 3' rise.
The natural food webs on land are also struggling, and are unlikely to survive ocean collapse.

Not just from deforestation, but diatoms are near a point of collapse from ocean acidification. https://diatoms.org/what-are-diatoms. That's over 1/2....and the base of the ocean food web.


Since the IPCC (again, known for overly conservative estimates) now says at current rates we could hit as much as a 6C rise by 2100, and rates of emissions are rising as fast as carbon sinks are shrinking, they're not just a possibility, they a likelihood in the near future....but granted the hydrogen sulfide clouds are far in a worst case scenario future, far from guaranteed.

@newtboy,

Walking backwards to simplify, my main point is that simply blaming ALL fossil fuel usage on the company providing the fossil fuel is stupid and misleading in the extreme. We don't see millions of people willingly abandoning fossil fuels and living in abject poverty to save the world, instead they are all very willing and eagerly buying them and this video lets all those people off the hook. This video lets everybody keep using fossil fuels, and at the same time pointing the finger at Shell and saying it's all their fault. It's an extremely detrimental piece of disinformation.

"explain what, specifically, I claimed that's not supported by the science."
-Complete collapse of the food web
-Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees
-Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea
-Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2
-Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land
-Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years

No sir.
I even mentioned one group in America that never adopted petroleum...Amish...and I would counter your assertion with the fact that most people on earth don't live using oil, they're too poor, not too fortunate. 20-30 years ago, most Chinese had never been in a car or a commercial store bigger than a local vegetable stand.

Both customers and non customers are the victims.
Using (or selling) a product that clearly pollutes the air, land, and sea is immoral.

Yes, it's like our business is predicated on rebuilding wrecked cars overnight which we do by using massive amounts of meth. Sure, our products are death traps, sure, we lied about both our business practices and the safety of our product, sure, our teeth and brains are mush....but our business has been successful and allowed us to have 10 kids (8 on welfare, two adopted out), and if we quit using meth they'll starve and fight over scraps. That's proof meth is good and moral and you're mistaken to think otherwise. Duh.

Yes, we overpopulated, outpacing the planet's ability to support us by far...but instead of coming to terms with that and changing, many think we should just wring the juice out of the planet harder and have more kids. I think those people are narcissistic morons, we don't need more little yous. Sadly, we are well beyond the tipping point, even if no more people are ever born, those alive are enough to finish the biosphere's destruction. Guaranteed if they think like you seem to.

Um, really? Complete collapse of the food web isn't catastrophic?
Wars over hundreds of millions or billions of refugees aren't catastrophic? (odd because the same people who think that are incensed over thousands of Syrians, Africans, and or South and Central American refugees migrating)
Massive food shortage isn't catastrophic?
Loss of most farm land and hundreds of major cities to the sea isn't catastrophic?
Loss of corals, where >25% of ocean species live, and other miniscule organisms that are the base of the ocean food web isn't catastrophic?
Loss of well over 1/2 the producers of O2, and organisms that capture carbon, isn't catastrophic?
Eventual clouds of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean covering the land, poisoning 99%+ of all life isn't catastrophic?
Runaway greenhouse cycles making the planet uninhabitable for thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even millions of years isn't catastrophic?
Loss of access to water for billions of people isn't catastrophic?
I think you aren't paying attention to the outcomes here, and may be thinking only of the scenarios estimated for 2030-2050 which themselves are pretty scary, not the unavoidable planetary disaster that comes after the feedback loops are all fully in play. Try looking more long term....and note that every estimate of how fast the cycles collapse/reverse has been vastly under estimated....as two out of hundreds of examples, Greenland is melting faster than it was estimated to melt in 2075....far worse, frozen methane too.

You can reject the science, that doesn't make it wrong. It only makes you the ass who knowingly gambles with the planet's ability to support humans or other higher life forms based on nothing more than denial.

Edit: We are at approximately 1C rise from pre industrial records today, expected to be 1.5C in as little as 11 years. Even the IPCC (typically extremely conservative in their estimates) states that a 2C rise will trigger feedbacks that could exceed 12C. Many are already in full effect, like glacial melting, methane hydrate melting, peat burning, diatom collapse, coral collapse, forest fires, etc. It takes an average of 25 years for what we emit today to be absorbed (assuming the historical absorption cycles remain intact, which they aren't). That means we are likely well past the tipping point where natural cycles take over no matter what we do, and what we're doing is increasing emissions.

Cloud Atlas

Diatoms, and other phytoplankton, are incredibly sensitive to ocean PH and CO2 levels. This can be another feedback loop already in action.
As fewer diatoms photosynthesize, more CO2 goes unused, raising the concentration, lowering the numbers and health of phytoplankton, allowing more CO2 to go unused, raising the concentration, .....
Every molecule of CO2 added to ocean systems removes one molecule of carbonate, which is necessary for the uptake of iron among other processes. By 2100, surface carbonate is expected to decrease by up to 50%. That may well be below the levels diatoms can tolerate.

https://scripps.ucsd.edu/news/key-biological-mechanism-disrupted-ocean-acidification

If phytoplankton goes, so does the food web. They are the base. If the ocean food web collapses, eventually the bacteria that eat dead sea life will create huge clouds of hydrogen sulfide that cover the land, poisoning any still living organisms there. This has happened before, but on a much longer timescale, with near life ending results for earth.

Hydrogen Sulfide, Not Carbon Dioxide, May Have Caused Largest Mass Extinction. ... "During the end-Permian extinction 95 percent of all species (and >98% of all biomass) on Earth became extinct, compared to only 75 percent during the KT when the dinosaurs disappeared,"

A better title might be "diatoms, the tiny glass shards that support all life on earth, are struggling".

Bob, I have to disagree. There is no need to use that many question marks.

I think newt clearly said the title was dishonest. He also stated at the end, *lies for the misleading title

No personal attack there that I can see. Unless you are Paris Cloud.