Contemporary · Middle East · Disaster

2020

Beirut port explosion

August 4, 2020

A warehouse storing 2,750 tons of unattended ammonium nitrate at the Beirut port detonated in a mushroom cloud that flattened entire neighborhoods, killed more than two hundred people, and was felt in Cyprus. Lebanon's collapsing state could neither prevent the disaster nor explain it. The country's economic and political crisis only deepened.