That’s good to know, though the question remains why didn’t anyone do that in Beirut.
Fauci
I don’t think reflexive circling-the-wagons around the experts happens in every context. Certainly not much of that happens for economists or psychometricians...
A simple sigle act of rebellion (punching the expert) might, at best result in ‘start the experiment while I go get some ice, man, wtf is up with that guard’ or maybe ‘lets do it tomorrow’.
I think that the AN explosions are often preceeded by this conversation:
Intern: “Whoa that’s a lot of AN in a pile, are you sure it’s safe to have an explosive stored like that? Don’t best practices say we should store it in separate containers below a particular critical size?”
Boss “But then I can’t store it in a giant silo that’s easy to load an arbitrary quantity onto trucks from.” / “But space here in the hold/special shipping warehouse is at a premium, all that empty space is expensive. It’ll be fiiiine, besides that best practice is dumb anyway, everyone knows it’s only explosive if u mix it with fuel oil or whatever, it’ll be fine”
Intern: “What if there’s a fire?”
Boss” “The fire department will have it under control, it’s just fertilizer. Besides, that one fire last year was a fluke, it won’t happen again”
AN itself is an explosive (it contains a fuel and an oxider in the chemical structure), but is too insensitive to use as such. Like many explosives, temperature and pressure affect its sensitivity significantly. Critically, AN is an insulator, and with enough heat, will chemically degrade exothermically. So, in a big enough, hot enough, pile of AN, some of the AN in the middle is decomposing, the pile is trapping the heat, and making the pile that much hotter.
The best guesses I’ve seen for how the disasters develop involve that hot spot eventually getting hot enough, confined enough, and mixed with the degradation products of AN enough that it goes boom, and the explosion propagates through the entire hot, somewhat confined/compressed pile, creating impressive scenes like the one in Beirut.
The West, Texas explosion happened within a month of the Boston bombing. It killed more people, destroyed more property, and was completely preventable. The surviving boston bomber is in prison, nobody who made the decisions at the fertilizer plant suffered any consequences.
I think I’m the only one who found that confusing.
I think I’m the only one who found that confusing.
It makes sense because we don’t have good stories that drill into our head negligence → bad stuff, or incompetence → bad stuff. When those things happen, it’s just noise.
We have bad guys → bad stuff instead. Which is why HBO’s Chernobyl is rather important: that is definitely a very well produced negligence → bad stuff story.
That’s good to know, though the question remains why didn’t anyone do that in Beirut.
I don’t think reflexive circling-the-wagons around the experts happens in every context. Certainly not much of that happens for economists or psychometricians...
A simple sigle act of rebellion (punching the expert) might, at best result in ‘start the experiment while I go get some ice, man, wtf is up with that guard’ or maybe ‘lets do it tomorrow’.
I think that the AN explosions are often preceeded by this conversation:
Intern: “Whoa that’s a lot of AN in a pile, are you sure it’s safe to have an explosive stored like that? Don’t best practices say we should store it in separate containers below a particular critical size?”
Boss “But then I can’t store it in a giant silo that’s easy to load an arbitrary quantity onto trucks from.” / “But space here in the hold/special shipping warehouse is at a premium, all that empty space is expensive. It’ll be fiiiine, besides that best practice is dumb anyway, everyone knows it’s only explosive if u mix it with fuel oil or whatever, it’ll be fine”
Intern: “What if there’s a fire?”
Boss” “The fire department will have it under control, it’s just fertilizer. Besides, that one fire last year was a fluke, it won’t happen again”
AN itself is an explosive (it contains a fuel and an oxider in the chemical structure), but is too insensitive to use as such. Like many explosives, temperature and pressure affect its sensitivity significantly. Critically, AN is an insulator, and with enough heat, will chemically degrade exothermically. So, in a big enough, hot enough, pile of AN, some of the AN in the middle is decomposing, the pile is trapping the heat, and making the pile that much hotter.
The best guesses I’ve seen for how the disasters develop involve that hot spot eventually getting hot enough, confined enough, and mixed with the degradation products of AN enough that it goes boom, and the explosion propagates through the entire hot, somewhat confined/compressed pile, creating impressive scenes like the one in Beirut.
The West, Texas explosion happened within a month of the Boston bombing. It killed more people, destroyed more property, and was completely preventable. The surviving boston bomber is in prison, nobody who made the decisions at the fertilizer plant suffered any consequences.
I think I’m the only one who found that confusing.
It makes sense because we don’t have good stories that drill into our head negligence → bad stuff, or incompetence → bad stuff. When those things happen, it’s just noise.
We have bad guys → bad stuff instead. Which is why HBO’s Chernobyl is rather important: that is definitely a very well produced negligence → bad stuff story.