Well There's Your Problem | Episode 145: 2020 Beirut Explosion 

How make words good?

Cool sentence, definitely got all the words in there.

I mean, this podcast is an engineering disaster unto itself, so we do expect coverage disasters

Got to respect their commitment to post the outdated bad takes on the news. Alice always has the best takes. Ross trying to transpose his altruistic good guy persona on the IDF, and Liam brining him down to reality. Love these nerds.

@@josephmartinez3518 Ah yes, my favorite hosts, Alice Caldwell Kelly, Liam Anderson, and Liam Anderson.

Can someone on the ground please submit a safety third about this?

Are we done with wanting to 'live in historic times' yet?

Is this the first time that’s happened? I can’t think of a prior instance, but there’s also so much news happening all the time these days.

​@@jameslake7775east palestine

@@RooneyMaccentral glass lake

Yep! I'm from there and the theories were wild. Add to that a strong pinch of fakes and disinformation and jesus christ haha!

I fucking hate conspiracy theories.

​@@sir_stride Friend of mine who works for Rolls Royce on the actual engines on the plane heard about MH370 and immediately went "yeh nav equipment fucked up, and they got lost" Turns out there is a very clear correlation between people who cheap out on engines and poor maintenance of the rest of the plane. Then there is the position when it went off radar - you can't get bearings at high altitudes other than the stars and the sun and you would be amazed at how many people panic and can't figure out what side the sun is supposed to come up and it completely explains any random changes of direction because that's what lost people do. No conspiracy about aliens is needed, nav malfunctions have happened happened hundreds of times before only the pilots got lucky or the black boxes were found. Meanwhile, the internet is dedicating significant brain power to torturing the families.

@@SewingandCaring The absolutely most unhinged thing I've seen about MH370 was on Twitter a few days ago, where this guy claiming to be a top secret US government contractor (Whatever the flying _fuck_ that means) posted a FLIR video of a plane being teleported away by... Something? Claims the plane was MH370, that it was on fire and the only way to save it was teleporting it to some random location(?!) without telling the families what happened? I mean, how does *_that_* make more sense to people than "The plane crashed in the ocean and we haven't been able to find it"?

@@SewingandCaring also, Oswald acted alone

its crazy to think the show has been going long enough that we even can say "Several years ago" !

THAT'S WHY I HAVE A FEELING OF DEJA VU!

What episode did they do it in the god damn news?

pretty sure it was the Coasta Concordia@@FieryRedmond

@@ericfischer8295Costa Concordia is a gem of an episode. Schettino getting skewered is never not funny

Ye

looking forward to the surfside condo episode. the miami herald's engineering simulations for that one were as fascinating as its coverage of the tragedy on a human scale was harrowing

We're so much closer to finding out why that shopping aisle broke down

Gotta love the technical expertise in my engineering disaster podcast Ordinance guy? Check Radiodating guy? Check Geology guy? Check Radiation safety guy? Check (And gals of course)

waow

Then there's the bomb that's set off by a trigger phrase. MK Ultra.

​@@emilyadams3228i thought that was the bomb made by Italian football fanatics?

@@emilyadams3228mk stands for 'mark'

Devon most underrated part of the podcast

Devon has successfully clicker-trained the audience

@@lyndonwesthaven6623it’s true….now why am I salivating all of a sudden??

The hit-marker sound hss been ingrained in my psychy, even before Devon unleashed it upon us. They even use the symbol once in a while

Accurate description

In about 2005 it was possible to drive full circle around the Mediterranean - all the borders were open for the first time ever and I was planning to do it. I contacted every country and the Lebanon Govt were AMAZING - they were going to put on a diplomatic banquet for me and everything. THEN Netanyahu became leader and the boarders were closed immediately and the troubles started.

Note that I forgot they already did a Halifax episode, and I'll be re-listening to that one next

And the landscape.

Halifax, Beirut, and especially Hiroshima: cities with long histories which are also known today as units of measurement 😔

I don't know how it measures up to those two explosions, but there was a significant explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Oppauer Stickstoffwerke in germany. The hilarious thing about this is that the explosion was caused by _intentionally_ setting off explosions in a 400 t stockpile of this fertilizer in order to _loosen it up_ because it got wet, sticky and clumpy. Apparently, this has been done a thousand of times before without issue, but this one time, intentionally causing an explosion to loosen up an explosive fertilizer yielded a huge explosion, who could have known. Reminds me of me learning chemistry and my supervisor giving me 2,5 kg of ammonium nitrate for a reaction. It was, indeed, pretty sticky and clumpy, so how would I get the ammonium nitrate out of the bottle? Teacher gave me a hammer and a pickle and told me to do it like the miners do. I was hestitant for a bit and asked if that is really the best way to get explosive salts out of a bottle, by hammering sparky metals at each other. He told me that if anything goes wrong, I won't feel a thing, so I hammered away. I fucking love chemistry. The same teacher once found a bottle of picric acid that was some 50 years old and pretty dry. It should be noted that dry picric acid has a habit of exploding when you open a bottle if crystals found their way into the cap. We both went out on the courtyard to open it, the rest of the school evacuated. I kept 10 meters of safety distance so that the shrapnel would kill me slowly and not the blast. Either I'm in heaven now, or everything went pretty okay either way. I liked that guy, I hope he's doing okay.

@@stefangadshijew1682 hammer and a pickle? What's the pickle for?

If I heard correctly, 80% of the nitrate was gone, which means it could have 5x as bad, or 400% worse.

@@Blink1826000 This is an engineering podcast, not a math podcast. Nerd.

it's only 20% as bad as it could have been@@Blink1826000

There's a transport museum in Glasgow that's a Hadid building. They only realised after it was built that it was too small inside. So they had to mount cars on a wall 20 feet in the air, totally useless!

The Broad?

That one, yes@@isaacanderson5083

You forgot east Palestine ohio

Why did all those other non-reinforced concrete structures collapse? Are they stupid?

Coincidentally, it's also how establishment Democrats work. I love hate the west wing. Such a shitty show that keeps drawing me back with its naive optimism of "this is the best we can expect out of our government" and it's still like 75% fantasy

Someone (Devon?) was quick today!

Thank you sir/ma'am/them

@@eclipserepeater2466 (he/they if you're asking)

A true legend of the pod you are.

And, if only tangentially, Ep.104 with the SS El Faro, because this sort of thing happens to US flagged ships, with US crew shipping perfectly legitimate cargo too. Not being from the periphery of the global economy doesn't make people immune.

yeah, when Alice went into describing a rotating series of flags of convenience and renaming I was like "HMMMMMMMMMMMMM"

truly happy about that. I love that episode and have listened to it multiple times, despite its length. or maybe even because of it.

I feel you. Recently went to see a play a fellow biology teacher had written. There was a scene in which someone played a mushroom distributing its spores (flour). The scene was great, it was presented as a rap act with everyone dancing and flour flying EVERYWHERE. I was watching the particles floating in the beam of the intense stage lights and was very uncomfortable in that small space hah it seems like people just don‘t know.

That sounds like the worst time. The rap part, I mean.​

What was weird for me was the shape of the "police car" - similar to one designed to survive an MRAP. Militarizing civilians is where it's at. 🙄

Don't a lot of American cops drive military-surplus mine-resistant vehicles? Fresh from the wars in Middle East, delivered to police forces in military configuration? @@ssgtmole8610

Funny, we had Hess in South Carolina when I was a kid, wonder if they closed up? I had a couple of those trucks.

@@thomasdjonesn They're closed in the northeast too, you can still get the trucks online though.

​@@ssgtmole8610a lot of police departments buy surplus from the military at a steep discount, including vehicles like MRAPs. If you look at videos of the blm protests you'll probably spot a few driving around harassing protestors with teargas launchers and sound cannons etc.

What kind of nerd would want to stare at harrowing footage of a massive explosion when you could instead look at PowerPoint slides? No true infrastructure podcast fan 😤

And for some types of families...

All episodes on stuff happening within the last 10 years is sobering. However I enjoy this podcast (and also one about airplane disasters) because dealing with the technical aspects of a catastrophe helps me process it.

Yeah? Wait till you’re 40 and you remember like half of them

@@joearnold6881 I don't think we're quite there yet, most of the disasters are still pre-90s and you might hit 50% during your lifetime at this point but not necessarily that you remember

@@joearnold6881 cannae wait to be a ghost watching an episode about me

That's a feat making captain. "I like this software, so it's right" look good.

@@Quackagate The captain of El Faro didn't know where the hurricane was. This guy knew exactly where the hurricane was, and he once said he liked to "chase hurricanes" with the Bounty. Which was a functional sailing ship, yes, but it was built in 1960 as a movie prop. The ship itself was going to be destroyed at the end of filming but Marlon Brando threw a fit so it ended up as a tourist attraction and at one point lost it's Coast Guard certification due to its deteriorating condition. Oh ... The Bounty captain did at least call the Coast Guard when he realized the shit was getting deep, so I guess one point in his favor compared to Michael Davidson there.

@@Madhouse_Mediathe captain of the El Faro absolutely knew where the hurricane was. He just convinced himself it wasn’t going to be as bad as it was, and he was going to skirt around the edges of it. He wanted another bar story to tell his buddies

​@@Cinerary I suppose that's possible, but he was also going on data that was half a day out of date. I'm convinced he only had a vague idea where the hurricane was.

a fine grain approach

A whole big pile of anxiety for some

At this point, very few episodes aren't.

Always gurd your loins.

And that's just The Gods Damned News...

Truly a gem of an episode

I'm still waiting for some mad fan to animate that bit. somehow. despite its length

Mr pinned comment still found a way to get mad about it!

What did it end up being? I've been trying to avoid Israel/Gaza news

@@knightofficer More or less? An Palestinian Israeli-Resistance group carried out an act of aggression which *could* constitute a terrorist attack, in response to years of constant aggression from Israel. Israel responded by using the attack to justify genocide they've been openly eager to carry out, have been indiscriminately bombing Palestinian civilians, medical professionals, hospitals, refugee camps, etc.; and have even said everyone from children to literal UN officials on the ground were terrorists, to excuse such acts. It's… a pretty major shitshow. And worst of all is there's been a striking divide between the upper and lower class; the upper class, from celebrities to politicians, including ones you might like, have been voicing support for Israel's genocide, likening the "terrorist attack" they are "responding to" to 9/11, and saying anyone pro-Palestine are pro-terrorists. Meanwhile, even a majority of working-class republicans are apparently in support for the Palestinians, not to mention an overwhelming majority of anyone *not* Republican. It's *that stark* of a divide.

​@knightofficer The preponderance of evidence leans towards it being a misfire of a PIJ rocket into the parking lot, and that Hamas initially lied about the number of casualties.

*tenterhooks, comes from drying wool fabric, fyi for next time.

Get that cheddar.

Yay Liam! Yay Alice! Yay Justin! Yay Devon! Yay Seamus! Yay you getting the job you really want!

And his name was Ozymandius.

Will there be a Gaza episode?

@@jansamohyl7983 well the genocide in gaza isn't really an engineering disaster as much as it's a deliberate policy of destruction so I don't think it'd necessarily make sense

Yay Tacoma 🙄

i think that would be considered a butte

NOT THE TEETH ONES!!!

They should get somebody from trashfuture because of the banished to the lagoon bit

Texas City explosion, I think. That one had a bonus oil refinery as well. Have these guys done the Halifax explosion as well? Now that I think about it, there’s a few exploding-cargo disasters out there.