The thing about the chemicals that caused the Lebanon blast... and I will block your amateur blast analysis or conspiracy theories if they wind up in my mentions, just so you know... but the thing about the chemicals just sitting there is, so much of our world is powered by that.

They sat there for years and nothing was done and also for years nothing happened. Nothing happened! Because something doesn't *always* happen. And that's part of the social psychology behind how things like this pile up, or how things went in the West, Texas fertilizer plant.

We're going to find out, if they ever forensically untangle all the things that went into this explosion, what went off first, what it set off, what it set off (hi, again, I'm not asking for info or speculation here), but we're going to find that the specific thing that happened?

It was not a high percentile scenario. I'm sure it wasn't. There's a one in a million chance somewhere in there.

But in any situation like this, there will be millions of one in a million chances for tragedy, over the years.

Different times it could have happened, different ways it could have happened, entirely different things that could have happened that still ended in an explosion.

In every tragedy of negligence that literally blows up in an instant, this is the case.

And so the first cause in most large-scale tragedies is that too many people said, "Well, who cares? It won't matter if nothing happens, and probably nothing will."

See: Basically every large-scale oil pipeline we build.

I don't think anyone has finished tracing the full story of how the fertilizer got there (hi, I say a third time I'm not querying for information here, it's beside the point I'm making) but it seems rife with malfeasance and short-cut taking. With stuff people build bombs from.

And I don't think that literally nobody involved knew it was dangerous. I do suspect multiple people in a decision-making position said, "Well, maybe it won't blow up."

Planning for "maybe it won't" is usually cheaper and easier, and so we do it. All. The. Time.

Yes, and "Well, it was never a problem before." fuels both the safety issues that causes industrial accidents and the conspiracy theories that propagate in the aftermath. https://twitter.com/Timbeon/status/1291105804683272193

I keep saying I'm not asking for info to be dumped into this thread and sometimes when I do that people reply sarcastically like "Heaven forbid you learn something." I am learning, I am reading. I'm reading experts and people on the ground.

What I don't want, specifically, is for my thread to become a pile of unsorted information and misinformation, conclusions of varying quality and speculation and random people's gut feelings.

"Who would you recommend we read?"

I wouldn't. I'm not an authority. I evaluate what crosses my eye or what pops up when I search and I urge everybody else who is curious to do the same.

If you're worried about putting too much stock in someone who is a crank or bad actor because you don't know enough to know what you don't know, do what I am doing and ask yourself how crucial it is that you personally come to any conclusion at all about what happened right now.

I've read things that sound about right, sound plausible, sound well-reasoned and well-sourced, but I regard it all as tentative and preliminary at best, and I can do this and so can you because absolutely nothing hinges on us finding out The Real Cause based on Twitter clues.

But anyway. To return to the point: so much of our world is powered by the slack we assume will be present in ropes from which other people hang.

"What if it gets into the groundwater?"

Might not.

"What if it catches fire?"

Might not.

"What if it blows up?"

Might not.

It wasn't that anybody decided to burn Grenfell Tower, but it also wasn't that nobody knew the cladding was flammable.

It was that they decided it wasn't worth spending money on "will burn the whole building, killing everybody insideIF it catches fire"

It's not always even a pyrotechnic disaster.

What if all these sub-prime mortgages we issued and packaged as securities go default at the same time, ruining them as investments, leaving people homeless, and destroying the housing market?

Might not.

And when "if" comes to shove, it's always "Nobody could have foreseen" and "Really the watchdogs were asleep at the wheel" and my personal favorite, "Why didn't anybody tell me in a way that I believed?"

It seems like the people of Beirut had 2,000 tons of volatile chemicals illegally dumped on their city's doorstep by foreigners and then ignored by their government, very possibly because the difficulty and expense of dealing with it wasn't worth it when ignoring it was free.

But the "free" is only free up to a certain point, and then the cost is incalculable. Horrific. Cataclysmic.

"It was always fine"... until it wasn't.

Toxins in groundwater, carcinogens in building materials, chemicals lying around, aging infrastructure. Stuff gets left to literally rot on the grounds that if it didn't blow up or burn anyone to death yesterday it probably won't tomorrow.

And a lot of it... we're cognizant of the danger just enough to not want it in our backyard, in our community, in our country. We push it out somewhere else. We route it through other communities. We put it on a barge and shove it off across the sea.

Anyway. That's all I'm going to say. I don't want to take up space or take away from what happened in Lebanon by generalizing too much. I just. I've spent the day wondering what else is sitting in a warehouse somewhere, tied up in customs, left in a shipping container, etc.

All of the problems that someone didn't find worth dealing with because they haven't blown up yet.

Listen to Lebanon, love Lebanon, help Lebanon. https://helplebanon.carrd.co/