The Calamity Of Ignorance
The sparks were pretty. Alexandra didn’t understand much about the world around her. Political agendas, environmental setbacks, and secret conspiracies; these long, unintelligible words meant nothing to her. But when she saw fireworks on an otherwise ordinary summer evening, she thought them wonderful.
A mother. A daughter. A fiancé. A paramedic. A Friend. A dog. And three-year-old Alexandra.
All casualties in an unprecedented pair of explosions which tore apart the port of Beirut on the 5th of August. It killed around 180 people, injured 6000, left 7000 unemployed and 300,000 without shelter. 40,000 buildings were severely damaged out of which 3000 were residential structures. The United Nations estimated the damages amount to $15 bn. All in all, the explosion was “15 years of war in 15 seconds”.
As if the economic crisis was not enough. As if the political fiasco was not enough. As if the famine was not enough. As if the pandemic was not enough. Lebanon now lies in the remains of a disaster it caused all by itself, or at the hands of “incompetent criminals”, if you ask a Lebonese on the street trying to sweep up his broken city with just a broom. They blame the government. The horrific incidents are being taken to symbolize the perceived incompetence of embezzling criminals who are managing (mismanaging, rather accurately), an entire country - their government.
This said government is, however, busy trying to cover up the sore spots which have been left bare for the world to judge. Are they certain that they will be successful in burying them all underneath a sheet of rubble? Rubble, I note, which must be available in large quantities, if the images of the aftermath of the horrific incident are anything to go by.
In the meanwhile, the resilient Lebanese population, that has endured multiple previous shocks, still tries to valiantly hold the fort. Given how unreliable the current Lebanese government is and considering its long history of embezzlement of public funds and corruption, on the ground level it is only the humanitarian efforts of the population that one can count on.
The official version of the episode is as follows. Due to some triggering incident (yet to be determined), a warehouse situated in the port of Beirut caught fire and was soon ravaged by flames. Not before emitting a few powerful blasts which could even be heard in Cyprus. Apparently, the main source of the horrific explosions which generated mushroom clouds and a supersonic shockwave was ammonium nitrate.
The chemical was stored in the warehouse in abundance, (about 3000 tons if you think the word ‘abundance’ is simply a means of exaggeration). It had been stored there after being confiscated from a Russian vessel in 2013 and had been kept as such for seven whole years, allowing the powdered ammonium nitrate to solidify and thus have more potential to intensify the reaction when in contact with fire. A fact that had not escaped the knowledge of Lebanese custom officials. Now, off to the other end.What do we see?A government that stepped down. A Prime minister who resigned. Instead of showing a reasonable amount of accountability, they hide behind the “disaster beyond measure” screen.
Somewhere in Beirut, one Eddie, stepping over bits and pieces of the remains, wrestles the front door of his apartment, now without windows, aside that is smeared in red. “This is the blood of my brother”, he points out. “My government did this”, cries the city that is still bleeding glass and tears. After picking up pieces of a fallen city, Eddie and his likes gather and protest. And Eddie’s wounded brother is now recovering as will his wounded city. That recovered city, he vows, "will be ruled by the youth who did everything... to reconstruct our country".
After the second failed government in a year, the country waits for the light at the end of the tunnel. Lebanon has thrived in the dark for too long and the light is still at a distance. But there cannot be general elections conducted viably when these wounds are still fresh and these wounds cannot heal without a government that people can rely on. An incident unprecedented and repercussions uncountable.
Well, not entirely unprecedented. If we talk of destruction, some of the most common man-induced disasters have also caused the largest damage. This includes toxic chemical spills, fires, contamination of groundwater, transportation accidents, structure failures, mining accidents, and explosions. Beirut is not the first such incident that has happened and is certainly not the last of them.
Here, leaving out topics such as intentional nuclear explosions and wars, we talk more of the ‘indeterminable affairs’ which fall in the sphere of disasters.
While it’s hard to pinpoint whether the blasts in Beirut were due to negligence or whether there was some other hand at play, no doubt, it was due to human interference. Man in his folly, in his carelessness, in his greed, in his complacence and in his ambition, has sabotaged many things all at once. In hate, he gave way to green-signaling the development of nuclear weapons. In the arms of power, he approved spoilage and contamination. He wagered a fight with anyone for the sake of wealth. But these are all the psychological aspects. One might argue that these are not inherent in all. Still, it goes to say that all these disasters, however they came about, were not the work of a small group of individuals. Rather, it was due to the support of a number of men and women who directly or indirectly allowed the reasons for these mishaps (although it is too liberal a word) to take place.
The Bhopal gas tragedy, the severe Exxon Valdez oil spillage, the Palomares incident, the death of the Aral Sea in Russia. Notice that all these incidents are varying in both the degree of intensity and the direct effect they had upon mankind. But in some way or the other, they all emerged to be brutally disastrous.
Now, to the crux of the matter, for there is no use in giving any more context of the situations we bring upon ourselves. Why are such incidents so common? In 2019 alone, there have been 99 man-induced disasters, together resulting in an incurred loss of six billion dollars globally.
Coming to why this happens. It could be negligence and forgetfulness, undetermined errors, miscalculations, faulty machinery, degrading materials, leakages, sanitation issues, irrational dumping of wastes, risks which didn’t appear to be risks at a certain point of time, etc. Ironically, there is no single root cause. Take an excerpt from this interview of Willam Reilly, co-chairman of President Obama's national oil spill commission taken in 2010 following the BP Horizon calamity:
Interviewer: Do you think that we're too reliant on technology?
Mr. Reilly: I think we probably have a tendency to, and I guess it's a very human one, to assume that if things haven't gone wrong for an extended period of time, they won't go wrong, even though we are constantly intervening to improve and make more sophisticated the interrelationships among technology and human choices and decision.
And that’s just it perhaps. The reason for all this madness which encircles the world. Being too human. Maybe, just maybe, in the future, ‘human’ will impart a different essence than the one used in this article. Maybe other Alexandras’ and Eddies’ won’t have to be subject to such atrocities then. Maybe humanity will be wiser.