In Lebanon, staying alive is purely a matter of chance. Shell-shocked at home on August 4, the day Beirut Port exploded and reduced the surrounding areas to smithereens and oblivion, I could only recall the civil war days. I was once watching TV in the living room and my parents insisted that I come to the table to eat pomegranates fresh from my grandfather’s orchard in southern Lebanon. A minute after moving to the table, a bullet struck the spot where I was sitting.
Flash forward to August 4 this year. I was on the living room sofa when I felt it shaking. I ran to the kitchen to check on my mum as I felt a stronger tremor. From the window, I saw orange dust spewing into the sky. I knew it was an explosion a second or two before hearing it. My brother had gone out just a few minutes earlier. I tried calling him, but couldn’t get through. We sent WhatsApp messages. He replied after three long minutes.
The impact of the explosion was so powerful that people across Beirut thought the explosion had happened in their area. Some 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in conditions falling short of safety standards for six years in Beirut Port had exploded. It was a screaming example of Lebanon’s corrupt spoils-sharing political system. The explosion killed at least 200 people, injured over 5,000 and damaged an estimated three lakh homes.
Minutes after the explosion, videos started circulating showing the terrifying mushroom of smoke and news started coming through that it had happened at Beirut Port. I called friends living near the site. They were rushing to a hospital or taking others there.
Hospitals were overflowing with casualties and operating above their capacity. My brother picked up an injured woman he did not know and rushed her to the American University Hospital. But it was so overcrowded that she would not have gotten treated immediately. So, they went to other hospitals, where also she had no chance of receiving care.
They finally reached al-Zahraa Hospital. It was overcrowded as well. The wounded were lying down at desk counters and other spots because there were no beds left. She and others received stitches without anaesthetics because it was faster for doctors and nurses and because there were not enough anaesthetics for everyone. Some members of the medical staff went outside the hospital building and started suturing without anaesthetics. Many injured people could not enter the packed emergency section.
After that, the woman had to get a tetanus shot. She found one after visiting several pharmacies—the supplies of shots were running low due to the large number of injured people. Wounded friends and their family members shared similar accounts of their hospital experiences.
I could have been one of them. That day, I was scheduled to walk on the Corniche with my friend as an exercise to speed up my recovery from a recent surgery. We would usually walk a four-km route from al-Manara, the lighthouse that gave its name to the area, to the elevated waterfront walkway of Zeytouneh Bay, home to high-end bars, restaurants and millionaires’ yachts. It is about two kilometres away from Beirut Port.
I got lazy and we didn’t go walking. Zeytouneh Bay and its restaurants were badly damaged. What would have happened if I had gone there? During Lebanon’s civil war, there were countless times that my family and I missed being killed or injured just by chance.
Zeytouneh Bay was built on 20,000 sq m of waterfront land by developers, including a former prime minister. They only paid $1.60 per sq m annually despite the dwindling public spaces in the country. It was one of the countless cases of alleged corruption in Lebanon.
This explosion is estimated to be one of the strongest non-nuclear blasts ever recorded—around 200 times stronger than the Oklahoma bombing in 1995 and at least 20 times more powerful than Chernobyl in 1986.
In a poor attempt to rid the political elite of responsibility, political leader Gebran Bassil said the point was not why the ammonium nitrate was stored at the Beirut Port, but what caused it to explode. The cabinet appointed four of the five judges in the judiciary council investigating the explosion. No wonder many citizens have no faith in a Lebanese investigation and are calling for an international probe.
Regardless of the outcome, we Lebanese are certain of one thing: this explosion was neither an accident nor a coincidence. It was an accumulation of persistent corruption that blew up in Lebanon’s face.