The north block of silos, consisting of four towers, slowly tilted for days before collapsing, causing a huge cloud of dust. The silos had shielded Beirut’s western neighborhoods in the August 4, 2020 explosion that killed nearly 220 people, injured more than 6,000 and caused billions of dollars in damage. The collapse of a quarter of the structure on Thursday happened an hour before hundreds of people gathered outside the facility to mark the 2nd anniversary of the disaster. Authorities had evacuated parts of the port earlier this week – after an initial section of silos collapsed on Sunday – as a precaution, and there was no indication that anyone was injured. The 50-year-old, 48-meter (157 ft) high silos had withstood the force of the 2020 explosion that destroyed much of the port. Many in Lebanon, including the victims’ families, are demanding the silos be preserved for future generations as evidence of an explosion they say was caused by widespread corruption and mismanagement in the small Mediterranean nation. Sunday’s initial collapse was sparked by a week-long fire, fueled by leftover grain from the 2020 eruption that began to ferment and ignited in the summer heat last month. Firefighters and Lebanese Army soldiers were unable to put it out and it smelled, with an unpleasant smell spreading around. The environment and health ministries issued instructions in late July for residents living near the port to stay indoors in well-ventilated areas. Experts warned of more collapses in the coming days and said the entire structure of the silos was at risk of falling. After Thursday’s collapse, fire engines and a military helicopter sprayed water on the silos in an attempt to put out the fire. Emmanuel Durand, a French civil engineer who volunteered for the government-commissioned panel of experts, said eight silos still remained in the northern block. He added that this section has a slope of 3.3 degrees and has the same trend as before – almost 0.5 degrees “per day, which is huge”. “The southern block is still not moving,” said Durant, who monitors the silos from thousands of miles away using data generated by sensors he installed a year ago and updating a group of Lebanese officials on developments in a WhatsApp group. The anniversary came amid calls for an international investigation into the blast, one of the deadliest single incidents in Lebanon’s troubled modern history. The internal investigation has been stalled since December after legal challenges by defendants and accused officials against the judge leading the probe. Hundreds of people, including the families of the victims, marched from three locations in Beirut to the main road outside the port on Thursday. Some carried white coffins with the names of some of the victims, others carried mock gallows, demanding punishment for those responsible. “The pain is still the same,” said a man who had lost his brother. Two years later, none of the leading politicians have apologized to the Lebanese. The government called for a day of mourning, causing many businesses to close. Tarek Bitar, the judge leading the Lebanese inquiry, had charged four former senior government officials with premeditated and negligent homicide that led to the deaths of many people. He also blamed many top security officials in the case. But none of them have been taken into custody and two of the accused were re-elected to parliament in May. “There is no justice under the rule of the militia and the mafia,” read a banner he carried during the march – an apparent reference to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which has called for Bitar’s removal, describing him as biased. Many blamed long-standing corruption and mismanagement by the Lebanese government, saying it paved the way for the tragedy when hundreds of tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, a material used in fertilizer, were detonated at the port. “The state has no right to abstain from the Lebanese investigation and also to block an international investigation,” Cardinal Behara Rai, head of the Maronite Catholic Church, Lebanon’s largest, said during a special prayer Thursday for the victims. Some of those marching made a brief stop outside the French Embassy to urge France, Lebanon’s former colonial power, to call on the UN Human Rights Council to send a fact-finding mission to investigate the blast. They later gathered outside the harbor where they called for justice and vowed never to give up the cause, before disbanding peacefully. Official correspondence between political, insurance and judicial officials revealed that many were aware of the dangerous substances stored in the port, without taking any meaningful action to remove them. After the explosion, customs and legal port documents revealed that the ammonium nitrate had been shipped to Lebanon in 2013 on a dilapidated Russian ship and had since been improperly stored in a port warehouse.
