[ikk157]

I've been watching as much news as I could get about the blast and about Lebanon today as I was hoping there would be an announcement that XYZ is going to investigate the cause of the explosion, but nothing so far.  Apparently for an overseas agency like the UN to do the investigation, they first would have to be invited by the Lebanese Government.  And there is no Lebanese Government as the Prime Minister and Cabinet resigned today.  So now they have to try and get an Emergency Cabinet in being, but wow, it's complicated as this has to follow a recipe.  I.e. so many Christians, so many Muslims, the Prime Minister can't be XYZ etc etc.  Also, people are cynical and deserve to be so, as those who are going to be asked to put a Government together may be the ones who are the problem - like they have vested interests through entrenched corruption of decades old that they wish to protect and this may guide the appointments of the Interim Government.

Only bit of news I did hear is that the Prime Minister who resigned today admitted that he had received a report in July of this year about the danger of the ammonium nitrate storage and very critical warning that this may create an explosion that would destroy Beirut.  At least he took responsibility for the Government that failed to act on the report.

However, I did manage to find this article in The Guardian that makes good sense - but it's still a theory of cause put together by The Guardian and Bellingcat investigation by working through cell phone videos.  It maintains that there must have been also bags of explosives stored in the same silo as the ammonium nitrate. These explosives were also confiscated products - so I guess Silo 12 was a Silo used for confiscated materials and the picture I had in my mind of only the ammonium nitrate was wrong - there must have been lots of other materials stored in it and it had to have been a HUGE storage facility.

A Port Official said that just before the fire started technicians were working on fixing a silo door with an electric drill, and he thought it could have been a spark from the electric drill that could have started the fire with the explosives.  

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/a...-in-hangar

In the meanwhile, when Al Jazeera's reporter was reporting with the harbour in the background, I saw a large shovel engine moving earth around the area of the blast - so was wondering whether if and when someone is finally appointed to do the investigation, what would be left over to investigate.  Did they cordon the area off?  I haven't seen any protective barriers with police guarding the harbour.  Everything is in chaos with protesters milling around.

Excellent and very detailed info you provided right there!

Here’s my opinion on what grabbed my attention from the information you provided:

First off, the fact that they received a report stating the danger of how and where the ammonium nitrate was stored and they did nothing about it is outright ridiculous. And that’s not even considering the fact that it’s been like that for 6 years!!!! Just goes to prove how corrupt their government is. The report clearly described what could’ve happened, and unfortunately merely a month or less later, that’s exactly what happened.

Secondly, the reports of a door repair using an electric drill does explain how the fire started. Electric or not, when drilling through metal especially a lot of sparks are created. Which is plenty to start a fire on any nearby combustable material. 

As for the video you were talking about with the guy standing on the roof next to the fire, that’s exactly the video I uploaded to ufile.io and posted the link to in a post above. So if you want to personally have a look at it, it’ll be right there!

They’re currently trying to clean up as much as possible all around beirut. But especially the completely destroyed port which is now nothing but a bunch of rubble. There’s really nothing on-site that’s there to investigate. There are documents and everything on what exactly was stored in each warehouse/silo, so an on-site investigation won’t be of any use... and that’s also considering the fact that everything is basically nothing but rubble now, so trying to look for anything specific would prove insanely hard if even possible.

Bare in mind that Lebanon’s economy has been severely collapsing even before the explosion. And the port was one of the very few sources of income “holding it by a thin string”. But now that the port is completely destroyed, their economy pretty much completely collapsed. Hence clearing as much of the rubble as possible, as fast as possible, is something they must do so they can start building a new port as soon as humanly possible.