After learning of the explosion in Beirut yesterday, I wondered why 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate were allowed to be so close to the city center. Today I learned that it had been sitting at the port for seven years while various officials argued over what to do with it. It arrived on a ship that docked in Beirut in 2013 and was subsequently abandoned.
Gross bureaucratic mismanagement kills people all the time – you can look no further than the structural mess of the US healthcare system, or San Francisco’s cruel housing policies that cause rents to be several times what they should be. However, these deaths happen over time and in a distributed way, so we don’t notice them as much.
This is a case where the gross mismanagement killed hundreds of people in one giant explosion that was about 1/10 the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
I’ll say it again. Incompetent government kills people.