Anger rises after Beirut blast and evidence officials knew of Risks

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.

Rescue workers still struggling to treat thousands of people wounded in an enormous explosion that rocked Beirut turned their attention on Wednesday morning to the desperate search for survivors.

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.

The government’s minister of information, Dr. Manal Abdel Samad Najd, said after a Cabinet meeting that the country would enter a two week state of emergency, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. The measure gave the security forces authority to impose house arrest on anyone involved in the storage of ammonium nitrate at the port while the investigation continues.

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.”

As residents picked up the pieces, many saw the explosion as the culmination of years of mismanagement and neglect by Lebanon’s political leaders.

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.

Anger swelled around the country as people demanded to know who was to blame for the dangerous cache being allowed to sit at the port for years, and why it was not kept in safer conditions.

“As head of the government, I will not relax until we find the responsible party for what happened, hold it accountable and apply the most serious punishments against it,” Prime Minister Hassan Diab said.