The Day That Shook Beirut

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2020

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A mangled yellow door. Shattered glass. Blood. A devastating explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the port in Beirut killed at least 135 people and razed entire neighborhoods on Tuesday. This is what our correspondent in the Lebanese capital saw when the blast turned her apartment “into a demolition site” — and what happened in the hours after. Guest: Vivian Yee, our correspondent based in Beirut. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: As the shock of the blast turns to anger in Lebanon, this is what we know so far about the explosion.In a land conditioned by calamity, Vivian wrote about what it felt like to emerge from the debris into the kindness of strangers and friends.

Transcript

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0:26.0	Hey, Kyloshi, is that it?
0:36.5	We're driving past downtown pretty close to the port and everything is just piles of
0:44.3	glass and debris and it's just store friends shoved over and a hotel I was in.
0:55.6	Just near the other days.
0:59.0	Yeah, completely messed up.
1:11.8	In 2013, Lebanon's government detained a ship carrying 2750 tons of a highly explosive
1:21.0	chemical, ammonium nitrate.
1:24.0	Despite the danger that the chemicals posed, the government transferred the giant shipment
1:29.4	to a hangar in Beirut's port, blocks from the city's downtown and close to its residential
1:35.8	neighborhoods.
1:37.5	According to reporting by my colleague Ben Hubbard, port authorities repeatedly asked the government
1:43.7	to remove those chemicals warning of the risks, but they remained there, unprotected for
1:50.4	the next six years.
1:55.2	Then this Tuesday at 607 pm local time, the ammonium nitrate combusted, triggering
2:02.2	a series of explosions so powerful that the damage extended over half the city.
	...

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