When this whole thing had just happened, I read a timeline of the ship. It stopped in Beirut because it was a POS, and was barely able to move. They brought it into port to get it fixed, and the “maritime safety agency” impounded it for being a HUGE POS, and unsafe. Told them they could leave when the following list of items were fixed. The company that owned/ran the ship was running on a shoestring budget, and just plain old didn’t have to money to fix it. So, the cargo was offloaded into the warehouse, and the ship was sent to scrap.
Not exactly. The ship was not "sent to scrap" -- it was moored alongside the breakwater, almost immediately across from the destroyed grain-loading docks -- and was sunk by the blast wave.
I did a lot of analysis re the Beirut explosion -- almost none of which is yet posted on FR. In my series below, in frame 1, you can see the "AN Ship" -- moored across the channel from the dock area where the explosion occurred. Somewhere in my files, I have an OHI of the ship after the explosion -- visible underwater at that same site -- capsized onto its starboard side...
(In the "after" OHI (Frame #8) the sunken "AN Ship" is not visible thru the wave reflections.)
(Obviously, there is a LOT MORE info in that image sequence...)
TXnMA