I completely forgot about that. Yeah Leclerc does have an autoloader. Anyways it's about time the British and Germans and everyone else adopted automatic loaders.
Some people still argue that manual loading is better for various reasons but to those people I always say, a revolver has some advantages over a glock but at the end of the day, automation wins, hands down.
Btw, in regards to what happened in Beirut, the Lebanese seem to be taking part in a blame game all pointing the finger at each other. Anyways this article pretty much sums up what really happened. A shady Russian businessman unwilling to pay for repairs or dumping fees. A load of dangerous fertilizers and chemicals staying in a storage facility at the port for years because of corruption/incompetence and then some imbeciles decide to put FIREWORKS next to these chemicals. What set it all off was a welding job gone wrong, a few sparks flew and POOF.
Hopefully this will be a huge wakeup call for developing nations to get their acts together when it comes to things like this. In Iran there have been several explosions as of late and although some people like to simply blame Israel, some of these industrial accidents surely happened because of a lack of care, corruption or incompetence. The record breaking heat experienced during Iran's summers surely doesn't help either but at the end of the day allowing things like this to happen is simply gross negligence.
Article below is from the following website:
https://www.rt.com/news/497212-beirut-ship-explosive-fertilizer-revealed/
The cargo that blew up Beirut: Sailor REVEALS troubled history of doomed ship that brought TONS of explosive fertilizer to Lebanon
The explosion that devastated Beirut has been linked to a mishandled ammonium nitrate cargo confiscated from a foreign ship. Now a former crew member tells RT the vessel, owned by a dodgy businessman, was a disaster in the making.
Some 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate – a highly explosive fertilizer – went up in a
terrifying blast in Beirut on Tuesday, Lebanese officials have said. The
mushroom-shaped explosion left a wasteland where the city port stood, turning the surrounding buildings into ruins and killing more than 100 people. Thousands of others have been injured in a kilometers-wide radius. Personnel from the port authorities have been arrested while a probe has been launched into the mishandling of the dangerous material. But how did this ludicrously large cache end up in the Beirut port in the first place?
The ammonium nitrate cargo has been confiscated from the arrested vessel MV Rhosus, Lebanon’s Supreme Defense Council has confirmed. The ship is said to have entered Beirut port in September 2013 due to technical difficulties and was eventually banned from continuing its voyage. A deeper look into its history shows, however, that the vessel was a floating disaster, and trouble was brewing on it for quite some time.
According to the MarineTraffic tracking portal, Rhosus was built in 1986 and has been through quite a number of owners. Its recent history began in 2012 when it was bought by Teto Shipping – a company registered in the Marshall Islands and owned by a Cyprus-based, Russian-born businessman, Igor Grechushkin – just about a year before it was seized by the Lebanese port authorities. The company itself was formed that same year and Rhosus appears to have been its only vessel. It is now becoming clear, however, that the ship could hardly have been called a worthy vessel, even then.
‘A bitter sailing experience’
The ship sailed under the Moldovan flag, and its crew was made up mostly of Ukrainians and Russians. The chilling messages they left on Russian-language forums dating back to 2012 paint a picture of nightmarish work conditions from the moment they took on the job. Facilities in a dismal state, extremely low salaries and back pay issues are constantly mentioned in the posts, which mostly served as warnings for fellow sailors considering contracts with the company.
“Those, who worked [on the Rhosus] should be awarded ‘Hero’ titles,” one sailor wrote, in a message screenshotted by Telegram news channel Baza.
“The ship has no refrigerating chamber” to store foodstuffs and even the master’s cabin had no sanitary conveniences, the message reads.
RT has contacted a former employee of Teto Shipping, who served onboard the ill-fated ship – and his account appears to perfectly support the crewmen’s allegations.
Semyon Nikolenko, who was hired as an electrical engineer for the MV Rhosus crew some time in 2012, says both the vessel and the company management were
“not good.”
“It was my first contract, my first [sailing] experience – and a bitter one,” the sailor, now living in Crimea, told RT. The ship’s owner was
“all talk,” Nikolenko recalled, describing Igor Grechushkin as a
“sly” man who did not deliver on his promises.
Even more alarmingly, the ship had lots of technical issues, including malfunctioning radars and trouble with its main engine. Nikolenko’s story suggests Grechushkin could not have cared less about the problems, as he only financed repairs when the ship’s deficiencies were registered by port authorities.
There were frequent inspections in the European ports, constant reprimands, arrests.
Nikolenko admitted that Teto Shipping often sought to resolve any issues with port authorities through bribes rather than through rectifying deficiencies. Shortly before arriving in Beirut, the ship had been under ‘arrest’ for two weeks in Seville, Spain, where the port authorities forced the company to install a backup generator since only one of the vessel’s power units was operational, the sailor recalled.
The man, who served more than seven months on the ship, quit the job just before Rhosus’ ill-fated trip that ended in the Port of Beirut.
Dead-end trip
In 2013, Rhosus picked up 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate in the Georgian port of Batumi and was expected to deliver it to Mozambique but never reached its destination due to the technical issues. Following an inspection by the Port State Control – an arm of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) – it was forbidden from leaving Port of Beirut.
By that time, the crew had already been reduced to a minimum, due to the
“dangerous” nature of the cargo on board, Nikolenko says. A 2015 legal summary made by Lebanese law firm Baroudi & Associates suggests the vessel was then virtually abandoned both by the ship owner, who promptly declared his company bankrupt, and the cargo owners.
The captain of the ship and four other crew members were detained in Beirut and had to spend 11 months there before they were allowed to return home. Captain Boris Prokoshev filed a complaint against the ship owner in 2014, in which he said that the sailors had been left without salaries and food.
According to the captain, the vessel was arrested by the Lebanese over its failure to pay the port fee. Yet, he believes, it was an ill-advised move.
“It was no use arresting this ship. They should have got rid of it as soon as possible,” Prokoshev told sibreal.org, adding that Beirut could also have safely disposed of the dangerous cargo.
“If no one lays claim on the cargo then it belongs to no one,” Prokoshev said.
According to Baroudi & Associates, the ship’s dangerous cargo was moved to a port storage facility, where, apparently, it remained all these years. As for the fate of the troubled ship, which was last registered by the Marinetraffic tracker in the Beirut port close to the epicenter of the explosion, it might have sunk long before the port was devasted by the blast.
“It had a small hole in the hull. We had to pump out the water from time to time. Without the crew, there was no one to do that,” the captain said.
Mind-boggling violations
While for the MV Rhosus the jig was up then and there, the same cannot be said of its cargo, which remained a concern for Lebanese authorities for years to come. Security officials were aware of the danger posed by the ammonium nitrate cache and demanded that port officials remove it months before the disaster, local media reports have claimed. But the purported images of the storage site shared on social media appear to show that the authorities on the ground had a woefully inadequate understanding of how to properly store the explosion-prone chemicals. The photos seemingly show large bags stuffed with tons of fertilizer hastily lumped into a flimsy-looking warehouse – practically the same material that caused widespread destruction in Toulouse in 2001 and in Texas City in 1947.
In a grotesque twist, someone reportedly decided to store fireworks next to the combustible cache. The unofficial story goes that it took a welding job on the warehouse's door to set them alight, which in turn triggered the massive explosion of ammonium nitrate, with varying estimates putting it as equivalent to one or several kilotons of TNT.
That may not be the whole story, however, and while the Lebanese government has ambitiously promised to reveal the results of its probe within
“five days,” the disaster may have already pushed the crisis-stricken nation over the edge. Amid an outpouring of international support and heartwarming scenes of neighborly help, crowds took to the streets to protest the government, venting their discontent toward the overall state of the country, rocked by months of intense demonstrations. The blast has left between 200,000 and 300,000 people homeless in Beirut, multibillion dollar losses are being named, and the embattled nation now faces a deeper crisis than before.
Article below is from the following website:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020...-probes-beirut-explosion-200805191032840.html
Lebanese officials deflect blame as anger grows over Beirut blast
Ministers, port officials and judges trade blame as Lebanon begins probe into cause of deadly explosion.
by
Timour Azhari
19 hours ago
Beirut, Lebanon - A government-led investigation is under way in Lebanon to probe the cause of the massive explosion that ripped through the capital, Beirut.
The government announced on Wednesday that those responsible for guarding and storage at Beirut's port - the epicentre of the blast - would be placed under house arrest "as soon as possible," after the disaster left at least 137 dead and 5,000 wounded.
Damages from the explosion, which officials have linked to some 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored at the port, may be worth up to $15bn, Beirut Governor Marwan About said.
As the debris is cleared, anger has turned to rage after revelations that officials knew the highly volatile material had been stashed at Beirut's port for more than six years.
A top-trending hashtag in Lebanon on Wednesday was #علقوا_المشانق, or "hang up the nooses".
Ramez al-Qadi, a prominent TV anchor, tweeted: "Either they keep killing us or we kill them."
As heat rises around the country's decision-makers, some have sought to deflect blame onto other branches of the state - including Lebanon's judiciary.
Public Works Minister Michel Najjar told Al Jazeera that he had only found out about the presence of the explosive material stashed in Beirut's port 11 days before the explosion, through a report given to him by the country's Supreme Defense Council. He had taken over the post six months earlier.
"No minister knows what's in the hangars or containers, and it's not my job to know," Najjar said.
The minister said he followed up on the matter, but in late July, Lebanon's government imposed a new lockdown amid a rapid increase in new COVID-19 cases. Najjar eventually spoke the general manager of the port, Hasan Koraytem, on Monday.
He said he asked Koraytem to send him all the relevant documentation, so that he could "look into this matter."
That request came too late. The next day, just after 6pm (15:00 GMT), a warehouse at the port exploded, gutting the harbour and wrecking large parts of Beirut.
Najjar said he learned on Wednesday that his ministry had sent at least 18 letters to the Beirut urgent matters judge since 2014, asking for the goods to be disposed of. Najjar declined to provide the documents to Al Jazeera, citing a continuing investigation into the cause of the explosion.
"The judiciary didn't do anything," he said. "It's negligence."
But Nizar Saghieh, a leading Lebanese legal expert and founder of NGO Legal Agenda, said the "primary legal responsibility here is on those tasked with overseeing the port - the port authority and the public works ministry, as well as Lebanese Customs."
"It is certainly not up to a judge to find the safe place to house these goods," he told Al Jazeera.
Popular scepticism
Many angry Lebanese are demanding accountability and answers as to how and why 2,750 tonnes of highly explosive material was stored near residential Beirut for more than six years.
Management of the port has been split between a range of authorities. The port authority runs the operation of the port, and its work is overseen by the public works and transport ministry.
Lebanon's customs agency nominally controls all goods that enter and exit the country, while the Lebanese security agencies all have bases at the port.
Few Lebanese feel confident they will see justice for this latest disaster in the country's history, pointing to the lack of official accountability for the period of rampant corruption and mismanagement in the years after the country's civil war.
Prime Minister Hassan Diab has promised this time will be different.
He is heading an investigation committee that includes the justice, interior and defence ministers and the head of Lebanon's top four security agencies: the Army, General Security, Internal Security Forces and State Security.
The committee has been tasked with reporting its findings to Cabinet within five days, and Cabinet, in turn, will refer those findings to the judiciary.
In the meantime, officials in the executive authority, including Najjar, a minister in Diab's government, have attempted to cast suspicion on Lebanon's judiciary.
The case against the judiciary
The ammonium nitrate that blew up on Monday arrived in Beirut, reportedly by chance, on board a vessel facing technical issues in September 2013.
By 2014, the cargo had been unloaded and stored at Hangar 12 at Beirut's port - now a deep crater filled with turquoise seawater.
Public documents verified by Al Jazeera show that Lebanese Customs sent six letters to the Beirut Urgent Matters Judge between 2014 and 2017, urging the judge to get rid of the "dangerous" material by either exporting it, re-selling it or handing it to the Army.
Badri Daher, the director-general of Lebanese Customs, said on Wednesday that the judiciary did not act, and blamed the institution and the port authority for failing to get rid of the goods.
Najjar echoed Daher, saying it was the judiciary, the port authority and, perhaps, security forces who were to blame.
"There is no negligence from the public works ministry," he said of the portfolio that has been held by the Marada Movement since 2016.
"I'm surprised that they (the judiciary, port authority and security forces) didn't find a way to deal with this for almost seven years. It was an accident waiting to happen," he said.
Muddying the waters
Melhem Khalaf, the independently elected head of the Beirut Bar Association, said officials were undertaking a "pre-emptive attack to vilify the judiciary and muddy the waters on this case".
"Since when are officials the ones who lay down verdicts?" Khalaf told Al Jazeera.
He said the government's response to the disaster - forming a committee headed by establishment-backed politicians, and security forces who ultimately answer to those same politicians - is no way to find justice.
Lebanon's Judges Club, a body independent of establishment political parties, also said justice should remain firmly in the courts.
Investigating the Beirut explosion is "not within the powers of any committee, no matter what it may be", the club said in an implicit criticism of the government's investigative committee.
On Tuesday, Khalaf filed a complaint with the highest judge in the land, Public Prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat, calling for him to seek the expertise of local and international experts - including engineers, explosives and chemicals experts - to assess the cause of the Beirut explosion.
"The time has come for officials to stop misleading the Lebanese people - there are dead and injured and missing, and the country has been burned," Khalaf said.
"After all they have done, they are now coming to us and determining who's responsible?"