Beirut marks an awful anniversary with more disaster

Few bits of infrastructure are as unremarkable as grain silos. No one paid much attention to the ones looming over Beirut’s port, the rows of tubes inside a hulking white edifice that held 120,000 tonnes of grain. Drivers zipped past on the coastal road en route to the mountains or the beach. Locals with a sea view (and your correspondent) took no notice of them while sipping coffee on their balconies. Until the port exploded, that is.

The blast on August 4th 2020, caused by thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored improperly for almost seven years, turned the silos into both shield and symbol. They served as a giant blast wall, absorbing some of the fury and sparing west Beirut the level of devastation wrought in the east. It left them almost unrecognisable, an iconic image of that day, a drooping monolith that resembled a cake melted by too long in the sun.