If the French counter-Enlightenment figure Joseph de Maistre was correct when he said that “every nation gets the government it deserves,” then it’s difficult to imagine what the Lebanese people must have done to deserve theirs. Last Tuesday, some sort of explosion or fire of still-indeterminate origin ignited some 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored in a warehouse at Beirut’s seaport since 2014. The resulting blast destroyed the seaport, including Lebanon’s grain storage facility, and damaged a large portion of the Lebanese capital.

Over 150 people have so far been confirmed killed and thousands injured. Hundreds of thousands have been left homeless, and initial estimates of the cost to repair the damage have been in the billions, perhaps as high as $15 billion.

The unthinkable death and destruction aside, if the explosion itself were the whole story, there wouldn’t be much more to say. Accidents — and at this point there’s no evidence to suggest the explosion was deliberately triggered — happen, after all. And accidents involving ammonium nitrate can be particularly serious, as the people of Tianjin, China, learned almost five years ago, or as the people of Texas City learned in 1947. Even the negligence that left such a massive stockpile of such a dangerous substance languishing in a dilapidated warehouse at the port for more than six years would be atrocious, fully investigated, and prevented from happening again, but it unfortunately wouldn’t be especially remarkable. Similar levels of carelessness attended the Tianjin explosion.