An abandoned ship with a deadly cargo
How an aborted voyage in 2013 led to last week’s tragedy in Beirut
CAIRO— The countdown to catastrophe in Beirut started six years ago when a troubled, Russian-leased cargo ship made an unscheduled stop at the city’s port.
The ship was trailed by debts, crewed by disgruntled sailors and dogged by a small hole in its hull that meant water had to be constantly pumped out. And it carried a volatile cargo: more than 2,000 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a combustible material used to make fertilizers — and bombs — that was destined for Mozambique.
The ship, the Rhosus, never made it. Embroiled in a financial and diplomatic dispute, it was abandoned by the Russian businessman who had leased it. And the ammonium nitrate was transferred to a dockside warehouse in Beirut, where it would languish for years, until Tuesday, when Lebanese officials said it exploded, sending a shock wave that killed more than 150 people and wounded another 5,000.
The story of the ship and its deadly cargo, which emerged last week in accounts from Lebanon, Russia and
Ukraine, offered a bleak tale about how legal battles, financial wrangling and, apparently, chronic negligence set the stage for a horrific accident that devastated one of the Middle East’s most fondly regarded cities.
“I was horrified,” said Boris Prokoshev, the ship’s 70-year-old retired Russian captain, about the accident, speaking in a phone interview from Sochi, Russia, a Black Sea resort town just up the coast from where the ammonium nitrate began its journey to Beirut in 2013.
In Lebanon, public rage focused on the negligence of the authorities, who were aware of the danger posed by the storage of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse on the Beirut docks yet failed to act.
Senior customs officials wrote to the Lebanese courts at least six times from 2014 to 2017, seeking guidance on how to dispose of the ammonium nitrate, according to public records posted to social media by a Lebanese lawmaker, Salim Aoun.
“In view of the serious danger posed by keeping this shipment in the warehouses in an inappropriate climate,” Shafik Marei, the director of Lebanese customs, wrote in May 2016, “we repeat our request to demand the maritime agency to re-export the materials immediately.”
The customs officials proposed several solutions, including donating the ammonium nitrate to the Lebanese army or selling it to the privately owned Lebanese Explosives Co. Marei sent a second, similar letter a year later. The judiciary failed to respond to any of his pleas, the records suggested.
Lebanese judicial officials could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
On Friday, President Michel Aoun, in office since 2016, said he was first told of the dangerous stockpile nearly three weeks ago and immediately ordered military and security agencies to do “what was needed.” But he suggested his responsibility ended there, saying he had no authority over the port and that previous governments had been told of its presence.
The Rhosus, which flies the flag of Moldova, arrived in Beirut in November 2013, two months after it left the Black Sea port of Batumi, Georgia. The ship was leased by Igor Grechushkin, a Russian businessman living in Cyprus.
HALIFAX— By now, millions around the world have watched the videos, horrorstruck — a burning building in Beirut suddenly obscured by an incredible blast sending shock waves that razed large portions of the city, killing scores and injuring thousands.
In those videos, a pillar of grey smoke, flecked with occasional orange flashes, rises in the distance. Suddenly, there is a violent explosion — a black, red and orange burst of smoke and flame that is almost immediately swallowed by a rapidly expanding white cloud as a shock wave condenses water in the air.
In some videos, the shock wave can be seen travelling through the city until it reaches the camera with a deafening boom, throwing the person recording it to the ground.
For those in Nova Scotia, the images echo a cultural memory from more than 100 years ago — an explosion that is forever imprinted into the DNA of the city of Halifax.
On the morning of Dec. 6, 1917, in the narrowest part of the strait connecting Halifax harbour to the Bedford Basin, the Norwegian ship SS Imo collided at low speed with the SS Mont-Blanc, a French ship fully laden with high explosives en route to Bordeaux.
The collision started a fire on the deck of the Mont-Blanc, which quickly grew out of control. Twenty minutes later, the French ship, drifting toward Halifax’s north end, exploded.
It was considered the largest manmade explosion of the pre-atomic age.
Nearly everything within an 800-metre radius was wiped clean. The explosion destroyed buildings, grounded boats and flung the Mont-Blanc’s halfton anchor more than three kilometres. The shock wave shattered glass in Truro, 100 kilometres away, and was felt as far away as Prince Edward Island. The force of the blast exposed the harbour floor briefly. The resultant tsunami, rising more than 18 metres over the normal high-water mark, wiped out the Mi’kmaq community in Tufts Cove on the other side of the harbour.
Two thousand people died in the explosion; another 9,000, by estimate, were injured.
In Beirut, the reported number of injured is already in the thousands. The death toll is already above 150 and still rising.
For Jack Rozdilsky, parallels between the two events are apparent.
Rozdilsky, an associate professor of disaster and emergency management at York University, was also part of a group researching the 1917 Halifax Explosion ahead of the 100th anniversary of that event.
Through watching video from the Beirut explosion and his research into the Halifax explosion, he’s observed a number of similarities.
Alarge explosion in a port city
In both cases, a massive blast occurred in port cities with densely populated urban areas nearby. In Beirut’s case, it was traced to a warehouse housing explosive ammonium nitrate. In the case of the Halifax Explosion, the cause was a ship full of high explosives.
In both cases, the disaster was exacerbated by the combination of unsafely stored hazardous materials in proximity to dense populations.
Amassive chemical explosion
In the Halifax Explosion, the MontBlanc, a French munitions ship, was loaded with more than 2,600 tonnes of high explosives, including TNT and the explosive picric acid. The collision with the SS Imo sparked a fire fuelled by the benzene tanks on the deck of the MontBlanc. Minutes later, as the Mont-Blanc drifted toward Pier 6 in Halifax Harbour, the fire ignited the munitions on board. The resulting explosion had the equivalent energy of about 2.9 kilotons of TNT.
In Beirut, some reports suggest welding work on a warehouse may have been responsible for the initial blaze. Whatever the cause, it appears that fire was the trigger for the detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, used both in fertilizers and bomb making. Timothy McVeigh used less than two tonnes in the 1995 bombing of an Oklahoma City federal building, which killed 168 people.
The nature of injuries
There is a reason for the numerous social media videos of the Beirut blast: It’s because people focused their cameras on the initial fire from what they thought was a safe distance. It was while they were photographing the initial plume of smoke — from their apartment balconies, cars and boats — that the second, much larger blast occurred.
In a similar vein, in Halifax, the MontBlanc caught fire and drifted for 20 minutes toward the shore. As the crew abandoned ship, people lined the shore to watch the spectacle. And when the munitions on board the Mont-Blanc blew, all those people — on the shores, through the windows of their homes — were staring directly at it.
According to reports, about 1,000 people — one in 50 in Halifax at the time — lost some or all of their sight. More than 200 lost one eye, and dozens more lost both. And hundreds were left with glass shards embedded in their eyes.
“For the medium term, after the Halifax Explosion, there was a global shortage of glass eyes,” said Rozdilsky.
The explosion was the seminal event in the founding of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.
A similar pattern may emerge in Beirut, said Rozdilsky, given the number of people who were apparently watching the initial fire. Videos of many of the victims post-explosion show facial injuries.
The severity of the disaster may take time to fully emerge
Almost immediately following the Halifax Explosion, a blizzard hit the city. Aside from hindering search-and-rescue efforts, it also made determining the extent of the disaster difficult.
“From looking at the pictures coming out of Beirut, I might suggest that it may take a while for the enormity of this disaster to set in,” said Rozdilsky. “We know that this is a catastrophe. But the exact scope of this catastrophe may take days, if not weeks, to determine.”
The need for aid from outside
Reports from Beirut suggested that hospitals and first responders were over capacity in the aftermath of the explosion, both from the sheer number of victims and from damage to the city’s infrastructure. And that means help will have to come in from outside of Beirut.
It’s similar to what occurred in Halifax, said Rozdilsky. In the wake of the explosion in the harbour, the fire department and local medical facilities were destroyed; immediate aid was delayed because so many components of the relief effort had to come in from all over the country.
Homelessness There’s another thing that troubles Rozdilsky — shelter. Reports from Beirut suggested that more than a quarter-million people were left homeless by the explosion, as buildings were damaged and windows blown out.
“In Beirut, this is definitely going to be a problem, because we know it was a problem in Halifax,” he said.
The 25,000 left homeless after the Halifax blast had to deal with a blizzard in the immediate aftermath. In Beirut, they won’t have that problem, but the city will have to find a way to shelter 250,000 people in the immediate future.
The striking thing, said Rozdilsky, is how history repeats itself. Hazardous materials, poorly stored, near a densely populated city. A two-tiered explosion, exposing greater portions of the population to injury. The resultant homelessness and the need for aid from outside because the local infrastructure is gone.
But there’s another dimension. Mass disasters leave deep and lasting scars.
“There’s a process of remembering, there’s a process of coping, because you have the physical recovery of the community. But there’s also a social and psychological recovery of the community, which is a very long, complicated process,” Rozdilsky said. “And Halifax has been coping with that process for the past 100 years.
“I think it’s easy to understand the physical damage that we see in pictures. And that’s not simple to fix, but it can be fixed … But then coping with the longterm social and psychological impacts in the community that go on for decades. That’s going to be complicated, and that’s something that Beirut is going to have to wrap its mind around.”