The captain of the ship had some interesting things to say about the whole debacle.

- The ship had to dock in Beirut because they found out they were short of the passage fee for the Suez Canal.

- They were going to raise more money to get through the canal by taking on a job transporting machinery from Beirut along with the explosives

- The ship would have been overburdened by the machinery and the explosives, so they couldn't pass an inspection and couldn't leave.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53683082

>Government probably didn't know what to do with it.

Move it to somewhere remote? Anywhere but in Beirut would have been better.

That's where the incompetence comes in. When the crew was allowed to leave and the explosives were brought onshore, the judge ordered the government to either sell it off or move it to a more permanent storage facility; the government just never got around to it.

This is government, you can't just "move it somewhere". You have to have a budget, get permitting, put out an rfq for the moving and storing of explosive materials, deal with lawsuits around the contact and the nimbys who don't want explosives stored near them. Years doesn't surprise me at all, and that's if someone was actually motivated.

So this means you can blow up another country by just sending a ship full of explosives to their dock with invalid papers... perfection.

> This is government

It actually isn’t. This sort of thing isn’t particularly common and people are usually prevented from setting these situations up by following (however grudgingly) the rules.

This happened where the government was dysfunctional, corrupt, bankrupt and the country was under huge strain.

How many governments do you think have a ready-made safe and secured spot in waiting to store thousands of tons of explosives? Some very wealthy nations might, but I suspect very few could have handled this much better.

Isn't it what military is for? Surely every military on the planet has protocols and infrastructure around ordnance disposal. As well as logistics capability to pick it up and transport to the disposal/storage site.

And yet explosions this large are rare. Taking the material off the owner is a last resort. Regulation can prevent the problem long before it gets to the stage it got to in Lebanon.

Assuming I’m wrong, why are there not more explosions?

This stuff sat there without exploding for seven years, and was only set off because of two unfortunate coincidences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enschede_fireworks_disaster happened in a western country with a reputable company that followed the regulations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery is still sitting in prime position to destroy London's financial district one day, with no-one taking responsibility for clearing it up.

In the first example of exploding fireworks, the company was not following regulations, as noted in your link. The fireworks were stored illegally and people went to prison as a result of their behaviour.

The second is bad, but isn’t the same the same as it’s there by accident and the remedy is far from clear. Depending on who you believe, the munitions are either safe now, or can’t be touched. Quite how that gets managed I don’t know.

The link also says this about the last time they tried to manage a sunken munitions ship:

“One of the reasons that the explosives have not been removed was the unfortunate outcome of a similar operation in July 1967, to neutralize the contents of SS Kielce, a ship of Polish origin, sunk in 1946, off Folkestone in the English Channel. During preliminary work, Kielce exploded with a force equivalent to an earthquake measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale, digging a 20-foot-deep (6 m) crater in the seabed and bringing "panic and chaos" to Folkestone, although there were no injuries.[5] Kielce was at least 3 or 4 miles (4.8 or 6.4 km) from land, sunk in deeper water than Richard Montgomery, and had "just a fraction" of the load of explosives”

At least they could've dispersed it in multiple smaller storage areas, rather than accumulating it all together.

They could literally Kiat scatter it on the land. It’s a fertiliser

I agree with your assessment of why moving the explosives was so difficult, but I would quibble with the use of "nimby" in this context. I think most anyone has a legitimate concern for not wanting that in their vicinity.

If they seized it, couldn’t they just have sold it to get rid of it?

looking back yes. But IIRC, bankruptcy was declared and this was someone's property. Obviously pretty stupid but everyone must have hoped it will solve itself. They could have sold it and held the money in an account, it's not like they were the crown jewels of the British Royal family. $12 Billion negligence, plus the dead and wounded.