At 4:18 p.m. local time on June 27, a serious accident occurred at Jordan's only port, the Port of Aqaba, in which a tank containing toxic gases fell during the hoisting process, and dozens of tons of toxic gases leaked instantaneously. As of now, the death toll from the accident has risen to 14 and another 265 injured, jordanian authorities have asked local residents to stay indoors and close their doors and windows, Jordanians reported.
Video footage shows that during the loading of the chlorine tanker box to the ship, due to the failure of the crane, a cable lifting the gas tank filled with 25 tons of toxic gas (chlorine) suddenly broke, suddenly fell onto the deck of a ship and exploded. As a result of the gas tank exploding and leaking, a large cloud of bright yellow gas spread across the ground, and people rushed to safety. The second green trailer, which had been waiting in line for lifting, was also quickly driven away from the explosion site after being hit by the gas. As can be seen from the video, at least 8 of the same tanks are waiting to be transferred. According to local radio station Al-Mamlaka, the dropped tanks were filled with a full 25 tons of chlorine at the time.
Chlorine is a chemical used in industrial and household cleaning products. At normal temperature and pressure, it is a yellow-green gas, but is usually stored and transported at high pressure and low temperatures. Chlorine is toxic, invading the body mainly through the respiratory tract and dissolving in the moisture contained in the mucous membranes, causing damage to the mucosa of the upper respiratory tract. When chlorine is inhaled, swallowed, or in contact with the skin, it reacts with water, producing acids that damage the body's cells. Inhaling high concentrations of chlorine can cause a fluid effusion in the lungs, a life-threatening condition called pulmonary edema. In human history, chlorine has been used as a chemical weapon during World War I.
Mohammed al-Mubaidin, the former head of the Aqaba Port Operating Company, told the media that a ship was waiting at the dock to ship 20 liquefied gas tanks "containing an extremely high proportion of chlorine" at the time.
Aqaba (Arabic: العقبة, Al-ʻAqabah) is a coastal city at the southernmost tip of Jordan, the capital of Aqaba Province, located at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba. The port city of Aqaba is of great strategic importance to Jordan, located at the southernmost tip of Jordan's territory, Jordan's only outlet to the sea, 300 kilometers from the capital Amman, and has been an important merchant in the Middle East since ancient times. It is uniquely located in a unique location bordered by the Israeli city of Eilat to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the southeast, and Egypt's Sinai Peninsula to the southwest.
Administrative divisions of Jordan
Port of Aqaba
The Aqaba Container Terminal is Jordan's only container port and the second busiest port in the Red Sea. Its strategic position, spanning three continents and four countries, makes it the gateway of choice, particularly for the eastern Mediterranean region, where it currently offers port calls for some 20 of the world's top shipping lines. The Port of Aqaba has 18 terminals, two large container berths, which can berth 100,000-ton cargo ships, and has loading and unloading capacity of various scales.
The Gulf of Aqaba, where the port of Aqaba is located, is indeed not well-known, but it has a shikoku port and several particularly famous "neighbors". To the west is the famous Sinai Peninsula, and further west is the more famous Suez Canal– the dividing line between Asia and Africa. The four ports and countries are Aqaba in Jordan, Eilat in Israel, Taba in Egypt, and Hagler in Saudi Arabia.
Taba in Egypt, Eilat in Israel, and Aqaba in Jordan, the three ports are closely linked to 10 kilometers, but the port of Khaleq in Saudi Arabia is farther away. Saudi Arabia is an important oil exporter, but Saudi oil exports mainly go to the Persian Gulf, even if it is shipped to Europe through the Red Sea, it does not pass through the Gulf of Aqaba. So the port of Hagler has little presence on the Saudi transport map, and the port of Hagler is less than ten kilometers from the southern border of Jordan. Thanks to the Suez Canal, the port of Taba is also not important to Egypt. Because Israel and the Arab countries are feuding, the port of Aqaba has become an important port for Arab countries in the central and western parts of the Arabian Peninsula to transport the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, such as Iraq.
Narrow coastline and exchange of history
Jordan's coastline is not long, only twenty-six kilometers, located on the eastern side of the northernmost tip of the Gulf of Aqaba, which is Jordan's only coastal province. To the south of Aqaba is Saudi Arabia, to the north is Israel's Eilat, and across the sea is Egypt's Asian part of the Sinai Peninsula.
From the port of Aqaba province, through the Gulf of Aqaba, through the Strait of Tiran to the Red Sea, north through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, and through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas.
After reaching the Red Sea from the Tiran Strait, it can also head south, through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait out of the Gulf of Aden to the Arabian Sea, and all the way east through the Indian and Pacific Oceans to eastern Asia.
A short stretch of coastline could open Jordan's door to the wider world, so every kilometer of it has an incalculable value, and its coastline was less than half of what it is today when Jordan first became independent.
Once part of Palestine, Jordan was later occupied by the Ottoman Empire and by the twentieth century it was the British capital's sphere of influence.
In 1921, the British divided the Balesran region into two, bounded by the Jordan River in the middle, Palestine in the west, and Transjordan in the east. Two years later Transjordan became a semi-independent emirate under the British mandate.
Later, the outbreak of the Second World War, britain suffered heavy losses in the war, no longer able to maintain control of large areas of land overseas, the second year after the end of the war, britain recognized the independence of Transjordan, in the next ten years Jordan gradually got rid of britain, and in 1957 let the British army leave completely.
Transjordan location
In 1925, jordan was given this coastline, which was only a few kilometers long, when it was still a British protectorate.
In 1965, Saudi Arabia and Jordan signed a bilateral land exchange agreement, in which Jordan exchanged 7,000 square kilometers of the Southeast Tubbag Mountain region with Saudi Arabia for three long strips of land totaling more than 6,000 square kilometers.
The areas exchanged between the two sides belong to mountains and deserts, located inland, dry and hot, and not suitable for the survival of a large number of people, but for Jordan, the addition of a narrow strip of land in the southern region has just extended the coastline, increasing it from 7 km to 26 km.
In comparison, Jordan's territory for exchange is larger, equivalent to Jordan exchanging about hundreds of square kilometers of land for more than ten kilometers of coastline, so is it worth it for Jordan to do so?
Before and after the replacement
Jordan's behavior is worthwhile from the current point of view, first of all, Jordan is very poor, extremely scarce, and shipping is also the most important mode of transportation for Jordan's foreign trade and development.
Perhaps the exchange of more land will have other effects on Jordan, but it is for Jordan to solve the problems of survival and livelihood and create the conditions for development to meet more development opportunities in the future.
After the extension of the coastline of Aqaba Province, the economic development has increased significantly.
According to statistics, by 2014, the port of Aqaba already has container terminals and bulk terminals, 29 fixed routes to more than 200 ports in the world, 22 deep-water berths, and an annual cargo throughput of more than 20 million tons.
The development of the port of Aqaba is comprehensive for the development of the whole Jordan, and the increase in the transportation volume of the port of Aqaba has stimulated the local economy, which in turn has driven the development of all walks of life, including tourism, transportation, education and so on.
The development of the port can also be kelp land, kelp air, Aqaba port has become an important transit place for goods, but also because the economic development attracts many tourists and workers, the increase in demand for transportation has made the port's aviation, road, railway development rapid.
The port of Aqaba's railway lines, routes, and roads extend to various cities in the interior of Jordan, bringing more tourists and investment to other cities.
But from another point of view, it cannot be absolutely said that this is worth it, there are gains and losses, Jordan is not exchanging some land for more than a dozen kilometers of coastline, as well as the airspace above the territory.
Although most of the land exchanged is barren land, it is not completely useless, for example, from a military point of view, space can be exchanged for time.
Moreover, a territory has but is not used for the time being and there is no such thing as no one, many countries have perennial ice and snow covered with bitter cold land, plateau mountains and rugged land, yellow sand and desolate land, but no country is willing to give up these places.
With the development of human science and technology, it is difficult to say how much value those plateaus, deserts, glaciers and other places that were difficult for human beings to survive in the past can play in the future, and nothing is set in stone.
The Middle East is full of oil and gas, and what is underneath it is unknown, and when humans can really improve the desert environment or discover the use value of those barren lands, the larger the land area, the better.
In the past few hundred years, human beings have begun to connect the world through navigation, people have seen the importance of the ocean, sea traffic is not blocked by mountains, plateaus and deserts like on land, people think that "control the ocean controls the world".
With the development of human science and technology, land transportation will become more and more developed, highways, high-speed rail and other modes of transportation are getting faster and faster, and the advantages of road transportation are gradually emerging, such as land transportation speed is faster, there is no need to bypass the entire continent like shipping, and countries with underdeveloped shipping connect those developed countries through land transportation.
With its backdrop to Eurasia and close proximity to the African continent, Jordan may not rely entirely on its only port if conditions are ripe in the future.
Many huge changes seem to be far away, but the real arrival may be a moment, so whether it is worth exchanging a large area of land for a stretch of coastline of more than ten kilometers must be specifically said, at least for now.