TheEconomistAugust 8th 2020 331T
he clockhad just struck 6pm when the
world shook. From Sassine Square, one
mile (1.6km) from the blast, it seemed like a
car bomb or a gas explosion—a disaster, but
a localised one. Only on the drive down to-
wards the Mediterranean did the scale of
the devastation become clear. Streets were
blanketed with broken glass that rained
down from battered buildings. At a busy
intersection three women sat in the medi-
an holding scraps of fabric to bloodied
heads. Beirut was an assault on the senses:
the crunch of glass under tyres, the wail of
sirens, the acrid smell of smoke.
The explosion at Beirut’s port on August
4th was gigantic. Residents of Cyprus felt
it, 150 miles (240km) away. Seismological
monitors in Jordan registered it as the
equivalent of a minor earthquake. The
shock wave left much of Beirut’s city centre
in ruins. By the next evening the death toll
was 135, a number that will surely rise as
rescuers dig through the rubble. Another
5,000 people were injured. The financial
cost will run into the billions, in a country
that can ill afford to pay.
The cause seems to be negligence, a
mind-boggling degree of it, even by the de-
based standards of Lebanon’s government.
In 2013 Lebanon seized a cargo of ammoni-
um nitrate, used in fertiliser and in explo-
sives for mining and quarrying, from the
mvRhosus, a Russian-owned vessel plying
the seas from Georgia to Mozambique. The
chemicals, all 2,750 tonnes of them, were
stored in a warehouse at the port. (The
Oklahoma City bombers in 1995 used just
two tonnes of the stuff to kill 168 people.)Some officials warned of the danger of
keeping a giant bomb next to a population
centre. Their pleas were ignored.
It is still unclear what ignited the stock-
pile. Local media suggest that workers were
welding nearby. Whatever the cause, it sent
forth a towering fireball and a shock wave
that slammed across half of Beirut. A sickly
plume of reddish smoke lingered over the
city long into the night. Scientists inter-
viewed on television warned residents to
shut their windows and wear masks be-
cause of toxic fumes laced with nitric acid.
The country’s intensive-care wards
were already near capacity because of a re-
cent spike in covid-19 cases. None was pre-
pared for the influx of thousands of urgent
cases in a single night. At Saint George hos-
pital, a kilometre from the port, the dam-
age was so severe that doctors had to halt
surgeries and evacuate the building. Four
nurses were killed by the blast and 15 pa-
tients on respirators died when their ma-
chines shut down. Other patients, clad in
their hospital gowns, some with ivlines
still attached to their arms, sat bleeding
and stunned in a car park across the street.
“It’s apocalyptic. There’s no other word for
it,” said a neurosurgeon at the hospital.
In a nearby apartment building the
stairs were slick with blood left by resi-
dents fleeing their ruined flats. Inside,
doors were blown off their hinges; furni-Lebanon
City in ruins
BEIRUT
A massive explosion caused by spectacular negligence shatters an already-reeling
Lebanese capital
Middle East & Africa
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