John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN PRESS TV
“Hezbollah chief says impartial probe necessary into Beirut blast
“Secretary General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has urged an impartial investigation into the blast that rocked Beirut on Tuesday”
Ammonium nitrate was undoubtedly the cause of the main explosion. There was a huge volume of It (2,750 tonnes), and it was stored inappropriately.
If stored appropriately, the pure chemical is safe. But it is sensitive to heat which starts decomposing it, and it becomes explosive.
It also can become explosive if contaminated with other materials. The Oklahoma City bombing some years ago used ammonium nitrate mixed with fuel oil, a deadly explosive.
I do think sheer incompetence was responsible for huge bags of the material, tightly packed together, being left for years in an unventilated metal storage room in a hot climate. The chemical’s purity is not known either. It had been seized from a ship that afterward was abandoned.
We have a few explanations offered about what set it off. One was a welder working nearby, a welder given no information about potential danger.
Although it dramatically illustrates the kind of carelessness and poor supervision which prevailed at the port, the idea of the welder does not explain two distinct explosions recorded.
Another explanation offered is fireworks. Apparently, there was a quantity – described as “30-40 nylon bags of fireworks,” whatever that means – inside the same warehouse
There are some important issues. One, there were in fact two explosions, and that has not been explained.
Two, I read an expert say that ammonium nitrate burns with greyish smoke. While we see greyish smoke in the photos, we also see quite a huge cloud of deep red smoke and it is even shaped differently. Clearly something else, something substantial, also exploded.
Was it the fireworks? Were there enough of them – whatever “30-40 nylon bags” means, a phrase that could cover anything from a very small to a very large amount – to produce so huge a cloud as we see in the photos? Literally a cloud like a terrific bomb explosion. Were the fireworks set off by the welder?
Or was there another element altogether to cause an explosion and to ignite a second explosion with the ammonium nitrate stored there, a situation of which the intelligence service of a neighboring, unfriendly state likely would have been aware?
We do have to keep in mind that there is one major beneficiary of this catastrophe, and that is very much Israel. It comes at a convenient time with all the recent tensions there have been on the Israeli-Lebanese border. It terribly weakens Lebanon. Already there has been disinformation about Hezbollah, an organization which resides in Lebanon, being responsible.
Hezbollah already has offered to assist and house survivors. Much as Hamas in Gaza, the organization has always had helping its society as a strong part of its identity. In 2006, during Israel’s Second Lebanon War, Israel committed the horrific act of dropping about a million cluster-bomb bomblets along the country’s southern regions, it was Hezbollah who worked with bulldozers clearing the horror that would have killed and maimed innocent people for decades. Israel had refused even to identify where its munitions had been dropped.
Hezbollah is not a terrorist organization. Israel has labelled it as that simply because it is effective, and it has embarrassed Israel several times. Hezbollah was born as a resistance movement to Israel’s illegal long-term occupation of southern Lebanon, 1985-2000. It drove the Israelis out, but it never invaded Israel, as Israel has more than once invaded Lebanon, killing a great many people.
We won’t know until all the evidence is in, but then again, as with so many possibly politically-connected disasters, we may never know.
