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Tom Harrington@cbctom
Ammonium nitrate.

2700 tons of it.

The Oklahoma City bomber used 2 tons.

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from Anger Rises After Beirut Blast and Evidence Officials Knew of Risks: Live Updates


[www.nytimes.com]

The chemical cache that apparently exploded was not supposed to be in Lebanon, but arrived there on a troubled freighter. Now, Beirut residents are digging out of the devastation, looking for survivors, victims and answers.

Lebanese officials knew the dangers posed by storing ammonium nitrate at the port, but failed to act.
The origin of the disaster began in 2013 with a troubled cargo ship.

The blast, so powerful it could be felt more than 150 miles away in Cyprus, leveled whole sections of the city near the port of Beirut on Tuesday evening, leaving nothing but twisted metal and debris for blocks in Beirut’s downtown business district. It capsized a docked passenger ship, shattered windows miles away and registered on seismographs, shaking on the earth as strongly as a 3.3-magnitude earthquake.

The waterfront neighborhood, normally full of restaurants and nightclubs, was essentially flattened. A number of crowded residential neighborhoods in the city’s eastern and predominantly Christian half were also ravaged.

Nearly all the windows along one popular commercial strip had been blown out and the street was littered with glass, rubble and cars that had slammed into each other after the blast. The buildings that remained standing looked as if they had been skinned, leaving hulking skeletons.

The casualty toll continued to rise; the health minister, Hamad Hassan, told Lebanese media that at least 135 were confirmed dead and 5,000 were injured, and some people were still missing.

“What we are witnessing is a huge catastrophe,” the head of Lebanon’s Red Cross, George Kettani, told the Beirut-based news network Al Mayadeen. “There are victims and casualties everywhere.”

With electricity out in most of the city, emergency workers were limited in what they could do until the sun rose, when they joined residents digging through the wreckage even as fires still smoldered around them.

“We need everything to hospitalize the victims, and there is an acute shortage of everything,” Mr. Hassan said on Wednesday.

***

Here is a look at what we know, and don’t know, about the explosions.

Lebanese officials knew the dangers posed by storing ammonium nitrate at the port, but failed to act.

The thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate that Lebanese officials are blaming for the huge explosion arrived in the city aboard an ailing, Russian-owned cargo ship that made an unscheduled stop in the city more than six years ago.

Lebanese customs officials wrote letters to the courts at least six times from 2014 to 2017, seeking guidance on how to dispose of the highly combustible material, according to public records cited by a Lebanese lawmaker, Salim Aoun.

Solutions proposed by the officials included exporting the 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which is used in fertilizer and explosives, or donating it to the Lebanese Army. But the judiciary failed to respond to the letters, the records suggested.

The general manager of Beirut port, Hassan Koraytem, confirmed that in an interview on Wednesday, saying that despite repeated requests from customs and security officials, “nothing happened.”

“We were told the cargo would be sold in an auction,” he added. “But the auction never happened and the judiciary never acted.”

He had “no idea” what caused the initial fire at the storage facility, he said. Four of his employees died in the blast. “This is not the time to blame,” he said. “We are living a national catastrophe.”

But for many Lebanese, the saga is another sign of the chronic mismanagement of a ruling class that has steered the country into a punishing economic crisis.

***

The countdown to catastrophe began with a dilapidated, Russian-owned freighter plagued by debts and a disgruntled crew. The ship, the Rhosus, flew the flag of Moldova and was owned by Igor Grechushkin, a Russian businessman living in Cyprus. It left Batumi, Georgia, with a cargo of ammonium nitrate bound for Mozambique, but in November 2013, it made a detour to Beirut.

The captain, Boris Prokoshev, said in an interview on Wednesday that he had joined the ship in Turkey after a mutiny over unpaid wages by a previous crew. Mr. Prokoshev, now 70 and retired, said Mr. Grechushkin had told him he couldn’t pay for passage through the Suez Canal, so he sent the ship to Beirut to take on additional cargo, including heavy machinery.

The machinery would not fit into the ship, Mr. Prokoshev said, speaking from his home in Sochi, Russia. When the owner failed to pay port fees, Lebanese officials impounded it, forcing the crew to remain aboard.

Mr. Grechushkin apparently abandoned it, and the crew, several of them Ukrainians, struggled to obtain food and supplies. Their situation attracted attention in Ukraine, and after nearly two years a Lebanese judge ordered the crew released. Mr. Grechushkin paid for their passage to Odessa, in Ukraine.

That left Lebanese authorities in charge of the ammonium nitrate, which they moved to a dockside storage facility known as Hanger 12. Mr. Prokoshev, who said he was still owed $60,000 in wages, blamed Mr. Grechushkin for playing games with money, and Lebanese officials for keeping the ammonium nitrate at the port.

When he learned of the blast, Mr. Prokoshev said, “I was horrified.”