[The Guardian] Chaos after the Beirut port explosion: Lorenzo Tugnoli’s best photograph

Chaos after the Beirut port explosion: Lorenzo Tugnoli’s best photograph

‘This was the place where we would all go drinking. In the days after, people arrived from all over Lebanon with brushes and cleaned up, street by street

Living in conflict zones teaches you about bomb blasts. After spending years in Kabul, I learned how to estimate how far away an explosion is. When a car bomb detonates, you’ll hear the explosion, but you won’t feel the shockwave unless you’re pretty close. But what happened in Beirut on 4 August 2020 was like nothing I had ever experienced.

I live in west Beirut, some four kilometres away from the port where thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate exploded after a fire in the warehouse it had been stored in. Despite the distance, my whole building shook. Glass blown out of windows littered the streets. I assumed the blast was maybe two blocks away, it was only when I went on to the street and saw the distant plumes of smoke behind the skyline buildings that I realised quite how far away it was.

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