The Daily - The Day That Shook Beirut

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

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.

Hey, what messed up. In 2013, Lebanon's government detained a ship carrying 2,750 tons of a highly explosive chemical, ammonium nitrate. Despite the danger that the chemicals posed, the government transferred the giant shipment to a hangar in Beirut's port, blocks from the city's downtown, and close to its residential neighborhoods. According to reporting by my colleague Ben Hubbard, port authorities repeatedly asked the government to remove those chemicals, warning of the risks. But they remained there, unprotected, for the next six years. for the next six years. Then, this Tuesday, at 6.07 p.m. local time, the ammonium nitrate combusted,

triggering a series of explosions so powerful that the damage extended over half the city. They leveled buildings, flipped cars, killed more than 135 people, injured 5,000 more, and left hundreds of thousands of people without housing. For many in Lebanon, it was the culmination of years of mismanagement and neglect by the country's politicians. Times foreign correspondent Vivian Yee has been reporting from Beirut since 2018, and she was at home in her apartment there on Tuesday evening. It's Thursday, August 6th. On Tuesday, August 4th, I had just gotten back from an interview and I was settling back into my home office, which faces the street, to catch up on the emails that I had missed while I was in a meeting and try to type out my notes.

and try to type out my notes. And it was a typically beautiful looking Beirut August day, but terrible feeling in that it's incredibly humid in Beirut in August. We're right near the Mediterranean. You kind of feel like you're just sloshing around in your own sweat. So I was kind of alternately fanning myself and reading. And pretty soon after I sat down, a friend of mine sent me a video over WhatsApp and she said something like, the port seems to be burning. I was just about to try to load the video on my slow, big-root internet connection when I heard this deep, like, rattling my bones boom. Like nothing I'd ever heard before in my entire life. And the building immediately started swaying back and forth, and I grew up in California, so I know what an earthquake feels like, and this felt like a bigger earthquake than I'd ever experienced in California.

I was obviously freaked out, so I ran to the windows to try to see if I could figure out what was going on. And all of a sudden, the next thing I knew, there was another boom. And that's when everything seemed to come apart. And I was just caught in this torrent of broken, sharp things. And then things stopped moving, and I tried to get up and out from under the desk and I opened my eyes and I was having trouble seeing things were blurry or things were kind of going in and out.

And as I blinked, I realized it was because my face was wet. Um, and I, I think I put my hand up to my forehead and realized that there was a huge gash that I could feel and that it was blood pouring down my face. I sort of staggered up and I could feel blood flowing from other places. And yeah, it was the moment when my vision just went wobbly, that I knew something was wrong. And then within a few seconds, I realized, okay, my neighbors are running down the stairs. Something else could be coming after this. And it's definitely not safe to stay in this smashed up place. So I need to get out as quickly as possible. And so I made my way to my door. I have a yellow front door, or I had a yellow front door, and it was ripped from its hinges and it was lying across my big dining room table. And my neighbors were running down the stairs and they kind of gestured to me to follow. So all I could find were these really flimsy white espadrilles for shoes.

I looked for something sturdier and I couldn't find anything under the debris. There are these huge windows in my stairwell that had just been ripped clean from their frames and twisted and smashed onto the stairs. And so we had to kind of climb through and under the window frames to get out. And once I reached the street, I hesitated for a second because I was honestly so afraid of what I would find outside. If it was this bad for me and my neighbors, it had to be much at least as bad for everybody else on the street. And I had to take a moment to kind of steel myself for what I might see. We'll be right back. Once I got outside, it just... I mean, I had walked down that street

10, 15, 20 minutes before. This was the first day that people were allowed to be out and in businesses after a few days of coronavirus-related lockdown. So people had been out shopping, they'd been going to restaurants early to make the most of, you know, one day when they could. the most of, you know, one day when they could. The storefronts looked like someone had just made a giant fist and, like, punched through every storefront, and cars were kind of stranded here and there in the middle of the street, and people were walking around sort of dazed and bloodied.

My first thought was to try to see what was going on at the Red Cross, which is next door to me, and as soon as I looked in their windows, which were totally smashed, I thought, okay, there's no way anyone here can help me or anyone else. And the weirdest part was that the sky was still so blue at that point. I never saw the mushroom cloud that you see in the videos. I saw sort of the lingering smoke from it, but I just remember the street being, you know, it was almost golden hour. So the light was just beautiful. And we were all just walking down the street.

It was chaos. People were going every which way. No one knew exactly where to go. And this guy on a motorcycle comes up to me and he saw that my face was bloody, I guess. And he looked at me in just motion for me to hop onto the back. comes up to me and he saw that my face was bloody, I guess. And he looked at me in just motion and, you know, for me to hop onto the back. And we ended up picking up another guy who was even worse hurt than I was. And so it was the three of us on this little motorbike trying to chug up to the nearest hospital.

Really, it was only motorbikes that were moving because the cars were stuck or frozen in place or there was just too much traffic or they couldn't drive over all the debris. So we eventually had to stop a few blocks from the hospital and I walked the rest of the way. But at a certain point I realized that my shoes were full of broken glass too and everyone around me was in the same boat. I saw people bleeding from the head, bleeding from their limbs, people who couldn't walk, people who were being carried, Bleeding from the head, bleeding from their limbs, people who couldn't walk, people who were being carried, people who were sitting in chairs with tourniquets on their thighs.

Because, as it turned out, once I got to the hospital, that hospital was completely devastated. I learned later that it lost several nurses and a few patients who were on ventilators at the time of the explosion and when the hospital got blown out and and the power went out those patients died. So they weren't accepting any new patients. That became clear pretty quickly. So a lot of us were just kind of wandering around, wondering what to do next. And it was outside the emergency room there that I ran into a total stranger who sort of grabbed me by the arm and was trying to help me get into the emergency room but when we realized that that wasn't going to work out he had me sit down on some stairs and he kind of wiped me off and somewhere found a bandage and put it around my

forehead gave me some water and then he was off to look for his friend. I kept wandering, kept walking. I was trying to get in touch with colleagues and with friends to see whether everyone was okay. I wasn't getting through to a few of my friends, which was incredibly scary. And so I just walked deeper into the neighborhood, hoping to see if I could get to a main road and flag a taxi to somehow take me to the hospital. But I didn't know how likely that was given that the roads seemed to be jammed and I'm sure everybody else was doing the same thing as me.

So I'm not sure I had a great plan at that point. And again, I got lucky. I ran into a friend of a friend and he was cleaning up the debris around his house and he saw me and waved me over and gave me water and looked at the rest of my wounds and you know cleaned the rest of them, and even disinfected them with Ada, which is a Lebanese aniseed-flavored liquor, and told me jokes, distracted me, bandaged me with what we had on hand, which was not much. And that's when my colleague Ben Hubbard found me, and we basically were just by the side of the road, And that's when my colleague Ben Hubbard found me. And we basically were just by the side of the road trying to see if anyone would stop and take us to the of the few hospitals that was still accepting new patients because every hospital in the area was totally overrun. And once we got to the hospital,

again, it was complete chaos. People were just lying on the floor or sitting in bloody armchairs. There seemed to be no sort of system for getting in. And then Huayda, who is our Lebanese reporter based here and an all-around Wonder Woman, she shows up and kind of just takes me by the hand and flags down a doctor and pulls me inside. And that's when they put staples on my arms, down one leg and all across my forehead. So it's after midnight in Beirut on late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning.

And I just got back to my co-worker Ben Hubbard's apartment in Beirut, which thankfully wasn't affected by the blast. route, which thankfully wasn't affected by the blast. I just got home from going to another hospital because 24 hours later, or I guess more like 30 hours later, someone took a look at my forehead and figured that the staples weren't put in properly because they were done in such a rush because the ER was overwhelmed. And so I had to get it restitched, but everything should be fine now. And I think driving back from the hospital into Beirut, seeing all the destruction, it just, it hit me. It really hit me, or it was starting to hit me. I had been running on adrenaline yesterday, and I'm starting to, I think we're all starting to reckon with the scale of the damage and to just think even in the best of times this would be hard to come back from but Beirut is in the middle of this deep deep economic crisis that was already

hard to see your way out of before this and I just don't know how people are going to even begin to bounce back in terms of the damage to their houses, to their businesses. I think it's a cliche to say, but it's also very true that Lebanon has been through so much. then joke around with the person they're patching up right after a huge, terrifying explosion. I just don't know how you develop that resilience and that humor. I think some Lebanese would say, well, that's why, because we can't live life just in fear and looking over our shoulders. The only way that we have been able to survive this country is to be resilient. the economic crisis, maybe there comes a point where resilience is not a virtue, where people

need to recognize that things won't be okay unless something changes. And if it's true that, as the government is saying, this explosion was due to just this colossal failure of management, just real incompetence, then I think if the government had any credibility left, and I don't think it did, that would destroy the last shred of it. destroy the last shred of it. So tomorrow I'll try to get back into my apartment, try to get back to the neighborhood,

and I've been told that my building, along with a lot of others, might collapse. So we'll see. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, the acting inspector general of the State Department resigned, less than three months after replacing the previous inspector general, who was fired by President Trump after he opened investigations into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The State Department gave no explanation for the departure, but it immediately raised questions about whether the Trump administration is driving out internal watchdogs whose job it is to hold cabinet members accountable for their actions. And... Today, the people of St. Louis made a decision.

Yes. From all corners of Missouri's 1st District, our communities have embraced a bold, fearless vision of real change where regular, everyday people like us can feel it. Today, the people won. Progressive Democrats have won a series of closely watched congressional primaries in Missouri and Michigan, highlighting their growing influence within the party.

So let me just say, it is historic that this year of all years, we're sending a Black working class single mother who's been fighting for Black lives from Ferguson all the way to the Hall of the Congress. In Missouri, Cori Bush, an activist who has protested police brutality, defeated Democratic Representative William Lacey Clay Jr., a 10-term incumbent whose family had represented the St. Louis area for more than 50 years. And in Michigan, Representative Rashida Tlaib, an outspoken liberal, easily fended off a challenge from Detroit's moderate city council leader, Brenda Jones, to win a second term in the House. In a statement, Tlaib said that her district was, quote, done waiting for transformative change, adding, they want an unapologetic fighter.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.