With at least 137 dead, including an American, hundreds still missing, and more than 5,000 injured, the Beirut port terminal explosion of Aug. 5, 2020, grabbed the world’s attention.
In September 2013, a cargo ship named MV Rhosus, owned by a Cyprus-based Russian businessman, sailed from the Black Sea for Mozambique carrying 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, which is used in fertilizers and explosives. The ship broke down and docked in Beirut, where it was declared unseaworthy and abandoned by its owner. The cargo, too, was abandoned by its consignee. For the next 6 1/2 years, it sat in a storage building in Beirut’s port facilities. Then it blew up.
Ammonium nitrate, mixed with fuel oil, produces the explosive ANFO, which accounts for 80% of explosives used commercially in the U.S. for such purposes as mining, construction, and road building. A batch of crude home-made ANFO was used in the 1994 Oklahoma City bombing. The stockpile of ammonium nitrate that blew up in Beirut’s port was 1,300 times as big as that bomb, and had an explosive yield of a little less than one-fifth of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Roughly equivalent to a small tactical nuclear weapon.
President Trump, a guy not known for getting facts straight, immediately blamed the explosion on an “attack.” It probably wasn’t. This stuff can go off by accident. (See what experts say here.) A similar explosion of the same material leveled a fertilizer plant in West, Texas, in (ironically) 2013. Read about that incident here.