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The explosion of August 4th, 2020 remains deeply ingrained in the memory of the Lebanese people. The apocalyptic images have gone viral and generated an emotional tidal wave worldwide. Three years after the tragedy, This Is Beirut met with Lebanese survivors residing in Paris. They have decided to share their testimonies.
August 4th, 2020. The Lebanese have been living in a country hit by an economic, social, and political crisis for almost a year now. Additionally, the COVID pandemic has spread all throughout Lebanon due to the medicine shortage. In the afternoon, a fire breaks out at the Beirut port, in one of the warehouses. Firefighters rush to the scene. The fire spreads. Thick fumes rise as the sound of what seemed like fireworks or gunfire filled the air.
6:07 PM. The devil’s hour. A gigantic explosion. The shockwave pulverizes everything in its radius. It is heard tens of kilometers away. Orange smoke covers the sky. Hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate–a highly flammable substance–have just exploded. Some 2,750 tons of the ammonium nitrate were stocked in hangar 12. Entire neighborhoods are destroyed, buildings shattered, families devastated.
According to Amnesty International, the explosion at the port of Beirut “was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in global history. The explosion sent shock waves through the city, killing at least 220 people, wounding over 7,000, and causing extensive property damage.”
“The room started shaking”
Rhea, who now works as an architect in Paris, was 22 when the tragedy occurred. She lived in Lebanon then and was completing her final year at university. Rhea was home alone at the time of the explosion. She was standing in front of the mirror, getting ready to go out. She recalls, “I remember hearing the sound first. I thought there was a car accident under my house. Three minutes later, the room started shaking, the doors and windows slamming. The mirror was shaking too.”
The young woman also remembers the conversations she had with her family and friends a few moments after the blast. “My phone was ringing. At first, I thought something had happened to my parents, who weren’t home. I answered the phone, and it was my father telling me to stay in.” Rhea remembers her friends telling her that “it was Israel that bombed a building in Beirut, the Grand Serail maybe. My friends’ brothers and sisters also called me to see if I was with them, because they weren’t picking up their phones. We couldn’t make sense of anything.”
Mike, 29, works in the finance sector in Paris. Aged 26 at the time, he was a Red Cross volunteer in Gemmayzeh. He was not far from the port when the explosion happened. “I was standing on the balcony of the Red Cross center in Gemmayzeh, looking at the fire. We didn’t know what was happening.” He adds, “I remember hearing a very loud sound, like a plane, so we tried to figure out where the sound had come from.”
That was when the explosion occurred. Mike’s proximity to the port affected him directly; he was blown away by the shockwave. “I flew back 15 meters, I think. When I opened my eyes, it was all grey. I couldn’t see anything. There was a whistling sound in my ears. For 10 seconds, I thought I was dead.”
“People were piled up on top of each other”
Mike and his colleagues immediately went down to the street. He describes scenes of total panic, confusion, and desolation. “The center and the entire street were destroyed. We were wearing our Red Cross uniforms and saw people running towards us. Everyone was panicking, no one knew what to do, including us.” He explains that the Red Cross ambulances “were all destroyed.” “We were unable to help people. We asked them to rush to the nearest hospital if they were able to walk. But we had no idea about the size of the damage, and we didn’t know that the hospitals had also been impacted,” Mike added.
Jihane, who was 33 at the time, was on shift at the hospital where she worked. She describes the situation there following the blast. “It was a catastrophe, total chaos. There was a state of total panic.” She adds, “Our hospital was not near the port. But all hospitals were overflowing with patients because a lot of injured people were coming from very far. A state of alert was quickly declared and the whole medical team was ready.” Jihane, a doctor, explains that there “weren’t enough stretchers,” that “people were piled up on top of each other,” and that there was “blood everywhere.”
She said that she had to tend to the wounds of her own sister. “I didn’t even have time to treat my own sister, who was injured at work… it wasn’t a severe injury, but she still needed stitches.” Jihane adds, “I remember she was still waiting for me in the emergency room 5 hours later. I went up and down the hallway several times, but I couldn’t find her. I couldn’t see the face of my own sister among the hundreds of people who were there. Then, I saw her sitting on the ground with other people, screaming my name.”
Jihane had the “obligation to treat injured people. It was tremendously stressful. We didn’t have time to eat or sleep.” Today, a doctor working in Paris, she recalls, “I couldn’t sleep, even when I went back home at 6 AM. I was in a state of shock. It wasn’t until 5 PM that I understood what had happened, that there had been an explosion at the port.”
“Traumatized”
Mike recalls that he sustained a few injuries in the head and back, but “with all the adrenaline of the moment,” he didn’t feel a thing. The young man added, “our house in Gemmayzeh was completely destroyed. We had to repair everything.”
For Jihane, everything changed after August 4th. The explosion–compounded by the economic crisis–was among the main reasons why she left Lebanon. “Like many other young doctors, it was no longer in my interest to stay in Lebanon after the economic crisis and the explosion,” she says.
Rhea explains that she was traumatized to the point that she had to “erase her memories” of the tragedy. “When French people in Paris talk to me about it, I can’t say much because I erased everything. I didn’t want to remember this disaster,” she says.
Rhea had family living in downtown Beirut whose “house was destroyed,” and she spent her summer “cleaning the streets” of the capital. “I even did my mandatory summer internship which consisted of rehabilitating the impacted neighborhoods following the explosion. It broke my heart in two. Every time I remember it, my heart stops for a moment,” she added.
To this day, survivors feel pain whenever they remember the events. The victims’ families are still waiting for answers and, above all, justice for the deceased. In Paris, the recently-established Lebanese-French Coordination Committee (CCLF) is organizing a protest at Trocadéro square in Paris, in the afternoon of Friday August 4th, 2023. The participants will also head to Courbevoie, in the Hauts-de-Seine region, to gather for a moment of silence.
