The Lebanese authorities warned today, Wednesday, that the cracked northern part of the grain silos in the port of Beirut is in danger of “falling”, nearly two weeks following the fire broke out, at a time when Lebanon celebrates, next week, the second anniversary of the horrific explosion.
The Minister of Environment in the caretaker government, Nasser Yassin, told Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati, according to a statement from the latter’s office, that the monitoring and sensors in the silos “detected changes in the bending speed from 2 mm per day to 2.5 mm per hour for the northern group of silos that She is in danger of falling.”
The warning comes two weeks following a fire broke out in the northern part of Al-Ahrat, which, according to the authorities and experts, resulted from the fermentation of grain stocks with high temperatures and humidity. Attempting to put out the fires by spraying water in the previous days increased the moisture of the grains.
The fire brought to the minds of the Lebanese people scenes from the August 4, 2020, explosion, which killed more than two hundred people, injured more than 6,500 others, and caused widespread destruction to the port and a number of neighborhoods in the capital.
Mikati instructed the concerned agencies to “prevent any of the workers or members of the civil defense and the fire brigade from approaching them in order to preserve their safety.” He also asked “the army and the Disaster Management Authority to prepare in anticipation of the fall of parts of the building.”
According to the Ministry of Environment, the southern silos are still standing, without any movements threatening their safety.
Some silos contain regarding three thousand tons of wheat and grain, which might not be unloaded due to the danger of working near them, fearing that this would accelerate “the movement of the structure of the silos that was already cracked and the collapse of large parts of them,” according to the authorities.
The Ministry of Environment and Public Health issued preventive directives, the day before yesterday, regarding the emission of dust consisting of construction waste and some fungi from rotting grains in the event of the fall of the northern silos. The most prominent of these included the necessity of evacuating the port immediately, placing high-effective masks, closing doors and windows in the area surrounding the port for 24 hours, and wearing masks outside.
Last April, the government took a decision to demolish the swabs out of concern for public safety, but suspended its implementation following objections submitted by civil groups and the committee of families of the victims of the port explosion, which demanded that the swabs be turned into a teacher who witnessed the explosion.
The explosion resulted, according to the authorities, from storing large quantities of ammonium nitrate inside the port without preventive measures, following the outbreak of a fire whose causes were unknown. It later emerged that officials at several levels were aware of the dangers of storing the material and did nothing.
The judicial investigations, which have been suspended for months, have not made any progress, in light of political interference and lawsuits once morest the judicial investigator, which are successively filed by a number of defendants, including current MPs and former ministers.
