In the past this kind of material would be collected and analyzed by state intelligence services.<p>Combined by allies and used to gain leverage for individual or combined strategic priorities.<p>Something like, “Here is how negligent you were. Install this person in power or we leak this and your people revolt and you won’t be able to walk away.”<p>More recently, it seems, some news organizations have begun assembling reports using modeling and expert analysis.<p>A good example is The NY Times report on Philadelphia Police use of tear gas against a group of trapped protestors. [1]<p>Having this information about the Beirut warehouse explosion open-sourced so-to-speak, seems to signal a further shift away from reliance on state intelligence and the advertising-funded third state.<p>This reminds me some of the collected content created and posted to social media by the public in the aftermath of the downing of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752. That loose set of content eventually forced the Iranian government to admit responsibility.<p>I’d presume that the quality and speed of independent research and analysis of public data will increase to where a scene of non-media, ngo research groups grows, beating out the resources of any given media or government.<p>Sort of like warez, but with information analysis.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphia-tear-gas-george-floyd-protests.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007174941/philadelphi...</a>
This is incredible and I can only imagine how much time this took to create. Definitely also worth taking a look at their previous investigations at <a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/" rel="nofollow">https://forensic-architecture.org/</a>.
From a laymen's perspective, it's hard to imagine just how negligent the port authorities could have been in managing the warehouse. 2750tons high-explosive Ammonium Nitrate? Check. 50tons Ammonium Phosphate? Check. Stacks of flammable wooden pallets among Ammonium Nitrate? Check. 1000 flammable rubber car tires? Check. 23tons of explosive fireworks? 5 rolls of detonator cord? Check. I mean... how/why?
Here is an article about how the ammonium nitrate ended up there in the first place:<p><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/05/beirut-blast-tracing-the-explosives-that-tore-the-capital-apart/" rel="nofollow">https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/05/beirut-blast-traci...</a><p>Here is an article about the history of ammonium nitrate:<p><a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/deadly-history-ammonium-nitrate-explosive-linked-to-beirut-blast/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/deadly-hi...</a><p>(comment edited)
I spent many years as a forensic engineer. In my career we worked on several high profile cases but none were ever presented as well as this one. Kudos to this team!
Excellent video. We have the tech and skill to reconstruct reality, at the same time we do not possess the skill to let reason rule critical parts of our (here: Beirut's) infrastructure.<p>As humankind, we are probably closer than ever to hassle free life and we will nevertheless go down skirmishing and fighting.
If you enjoy this, I'd recommend looking into the organisation Bellingcat.<p>They do investigative journalism using social media/crowd sourcing/leaked database, and many similar forensic techniques. They've done great analysis on the MH17 missile attack for example, which is documented in their podcast: <a href="https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh17-episode-guide-1/" rel="nofollow">https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/podcasts/2019/07/17/mh1...</a>
This was amazing to watch. Highly recommended.<p>I do start to wonder if any of such materials are stored like this in one of our ports, such as Rotterdam, The Netherlands.<p>I can't imagine such a mess to exist there.<p>But The Netherlands remembers the Firework explosion in Enschede, from 2000.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster</a><p>It's not nearly at the scale of Beirut, but it killed 23 people.
I hadn't seen the leaked footage and photos from inside the warehouse, nor the videos from the firefighters before the explosion. Very interesting.<p>This website (and organisation) is fascinating. There are other excellent videos on the site, for example:<p><a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-of-mark-duggan" rel="nofollow">https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/the-killing-...</a>
Money quote:<p>> Mr Collett contended that from an engineering perspective, the arrangement of goods within the building was the spatial layout of a makeshift bomb on the scale of a warehouse, awaiting detonation.
That is some serious level investigation and presentation. The video is insanely visually informative.
The 3D rendering matched with the mobile videos of the bags got my jaw dropped.
The 12 minute video is worth watching. I was impressed in the density and clarity in the resulting research. Great job and thanks for open sourcing this
I've been lucky last summer to be able to see one of the exhibition of forensic-architecture in Basel, Switzerland. And today i'm happy to see one of their work on my favorite website HN.
This was a very interesting work between art, data, dataviz, video art.
I would recommend to everybody to check their exhibition schedule and go out to see if there is one not far from you <a href="https://forensic-architecture.org/programme/exhibitions" rel="nofollow">https://forensic-architecture.org/programme/exhibitions</a>
There is a youtube channel run by the US Chemical Safety Board that provides similar reconstruction videos of chemical safety incidents:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB/videos?disable_polymer=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/USCSB/videos?disable_polymer=1</a>
The point the video makes towards the end is a good one: just basic storage standards were not followed.<p>Forget for one moment that this makeshift bomb laid dormant for years and nothing was done despite constant warnings from officials.<p>Had port officials followed basic storage etiquette, like placing the AN in manageable clusters, separating those clusters from each other by a moderate distance, and not storing other combustible material like fireworks and tyres, the Beirut explosion could at least have been mitigated.<p>The video makes a point that probably 50% of the AN exploded -> 200 people died. I shudder to think what double that would have done.
I wish they provided references to all media they used:<p><pre><code> - YouTube links
- links to twitter media
- timestamps for all the screenshots
- (best) zip of all media files on archive.org</code></pre>
This investigation ignores a key question: How many kg of ammonium nitrate was actually in the warehouse. Surely that's extremely important to the models. They only mention an mtv news report mentioning the stated figure of 2750t.<p>That figure comes from the ship's documents. Yet there are estimates that suggest the actual explosion is only equivalent to 1000-1500t[0], or 700-1000t[1].<p>If the actual amount of nitrate was lower that the stated figure this strongly suggests some form of smuggling was involved, and someone was siphoning off the material. This would immediately explain the enormous 'negligence' that let this incident happen in the first place.<p>[0]
<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493</a><p>[1]
<a href="https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/a-hidden-tycoon-african-explosives-and-a-loan-from-a-notorious-bank-questionable-connections-surround-beirut-explosion-shipment" rel="nofollow">https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/a-hidden-tycoon-afri...</a>
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy this video by the same team about the murder of a Bedouin by police forces: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQnQ-DJOa_g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQnQ-DJOa_g</a>
At 2:54, the commentator says "[...] as little as half of the 2750 sacks of ammonium nitrate".<p>At 6:06, the commentator says "The 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate [...]".<p>There is a possibility that they're describing 1 tonne sacks, but I'm left wondering whether they meant to say something else. An image search for ammonium nitrate packaging shows many 25-50 kg range sacks, and a 500kg industrial sack, leaving me a) wondering whether the report has sacks/tonnes confused and b) on many watchlists.<p>edit: A bit further on they show leaked in-warehouse pictures of sacks of ammonium nitrate that must weigh a tonne (with the number 1000 printed on them). Likely no mistake then.
I'm not sure I buy the argument that smoke plumes 1 and 2 have different fuels. The color change is fairly continuous, and smoke color changes continuously with the availability of oxygen.
The video was absolutely amazing. I’ve watched it at 1x speed and don’t feel like I wasted a single second of my life. This used to happen approximately never with videos.
They have identified four types of smoke plume. But they only reconstruct three types of material in the warehouse: fireworks, tires and ammonium nitrate. Aren't they missing something?
From the video:<p><pre><code> 5:38 [5:54pm] as reported by media outlets, the fire brigade arrived approximately 4 minutes after initial call was made to the station, at 5:54pm
4:48 [5:56pm] ..from this point at about 5:56pm the temperature inside the warehouse start to rising rapidly..
5:15 [5:59pm] the sound o fireworks start being heard, approximately 5:59pm, [titles over the gates: 'Closed Closed Closed'] it shows that many windows and doors are shut, according to the experts, confinement creates hotspots, areas of high temperature in which ammonium nitrate can get close to its combustion point
2:31 [6:07:44pm] .. small explosive charges as fireworks..
2:50 [6:08:18pm] single point explosion
</code></pre>
Does it mean that the fire brigade could have chances to survive ?<p>- if they open all the big gates soon after they come, making an airflow and avoiding confinement:<p><pre><code> would 'the temperature inside the warehouse start to rising rapidly' as well and
would it make the situation [in this case/in theory] better ('confinement creates hotspots') or worse (more oxygen) ?
</code></pre>
- if it could help (in this specific situation?), what was needed to make such decision ?<p>What was the best they could do, and what when having full situation awareness (run away ??) ?
I have the stupidest nitpick but the report's author (and <i>everyone</i> tbh) should use ISO 8601 formatted dates:<p>YYYY-MM-DD<p>my argument is summed up by the famous and relevant xkcd #1179<p><a href="https://xkcd.com/1179/" rel="nofollow">https://xkcd.com/1179/</a>
Here is a mirror to access the article that doesn't require executing javascript code. It is just a document. <a href="https://archive.is/BBe1X" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/BBe1X</a>