Holy shit. Moral of the story: If you seize a shit ton of fertilizer make sure you get rid of it ASAP.
for a minute I thought you meant like, a person having a seizure. ‘Nerds is like “guys, I need your help figuring out the past few days. All I know is I was in Beirut, and I can’t find my ladder anymore.” I’ve had a good amount of tequila tonight, is this too soon?
Sell it to the Michigan Militia? It’s hard to imagine why you need that much fertilizer when you consider the absence of plants in that region. Perhaps there are a lot of soccer fields.
No, that was my point. If they seized it, surely they did so because the possessor had intent to do something bad with it. What? Or, maybe there are a lot of soccer fields in Mozambique.
From what I've read, it seems that it wasn't seized so much as the ship was deemed unseaworthy and the owners of the ship and cargo decided that it wasn't worth the money or trouble and abandoned the whole venture. Then the Lebanese spent 6 years trying to figure out what to do with the stuff (which I'm sure involved officials trying to enrich themselves along the way).
They spent six years trying to figure out what to do with it.... and in those six years never even figured out that Ammonium Nitrate shouldn’t be stored in the centre of a densely-populated major city? And just to give you an idea of how much six million pounds is.... picture an aircraft hangar filled fifteen feet deep with the shit. Ammonium nitrate’s explosive power is equal to about one third of its weight in TNT. So basically The equivalent of a suitcase nuke (sans radiation) blew up in a city, just like in that absolutely terrible season of “24”.
warehouse with no sprinkler / fire protection + fireworks storage + ammonium nitrate storage . . . who could've seen that coming?
Every fucking person that lives on our continent (post-West Texas)? First you hear the blast, then the shock hits the church. STEADY YOURSELF, PRIEST!!!!
“Storage”. You should see the pics of the canvas bags they were storing it in. Officials who are found responsible for this are going to be executed.
Yeah, but then just randomly stacked like that in a warehouse? I have zero exposure to that kind of shipping, but that seems really whacked to me.
It's probably not that unusual. But, then, how often do warehouses need to stack 2750 metric tons of fertilizer for 6 years, lol. Properly arranging the material was obviously not their highest priority. And, I imagine they thought it was temporary. Sometimes, I visit waste cleanup sites for a client. There will be a warehouse with abandoned materials, and it is definitely stacked in a haphazard manner. And that's here in the US. Some business venture has the next recycling or recovered material that is certain to make them money. Three years later, they are hemorrhaging money, and walk away. The warehouse crap is what's left. About half the storage is organized and just leftover, because it was regular material they could move in and out, and then the other half are sporadic piles of "put that over there - we'll get to it later" and "make a little more room over there, just stack it on top of that other stuff 'temporarily' " and then, before you know it . . . 3 years gone by. If that fertilizer wasn't actively making money for someone, it was definitely not a priority.