On Tuesday August 4th, the city of Beirut was rocked by a devastating explosion. Videos of the disaster quickly flooded social media timelines, and news agencies around the world. In this bonus episode, Christine and JJ discuss and describe the blast and its immediate aftermath.
On Tuesday August 4th, the city of Beirut was rocked by a devastating explosion. Videos of the disaster quickly flooded social media timelines, and news agencies around the world. In this bonus episode, Christine and JJ discuss and describe the blast and its immediate aftermath.
Welcome to a bonus episode of talk description to me. As you probably know, there has been an explosion in Beirut with a lot of terrible things happening for the city and a lot of very troubling and terrible images coming from that. So we thought we would sit down just briefly today and talk about some of that to share with our listeners. So JJ, it's hard to know where to start here. In communicating you described, you said videos like I've never seen before, so I don't know where to start. Can you just sort of dive in and explain what some of the visuals are that you've been seeing?
JJ:Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, when you and I were, were, were messaging back and forth about this. These are images that I have not seen before that the scale of them is the, the, the scale of this explosion is it's incredible. It's massive. So after the first explosion and the first fire, which is downtown in a port area, a lot of people started filming. So when the second explosion occurred and that's the one that rocked the city there were dozens of people filming. So the things that make this extraordinary are both the size of the explosion and the fact that there's so much video of it. And so we thought this was that, and the fact that, I mean, at this point, there's a death toll of something like 100 people killed and 4,000 people injured. This is a major event. And we thought, let's, let's describe this as quickly as possible. So a little bit of background information Beirut is a city of about 2 million people somewhere around there, and it's a coastal city and this, this explosion took place in a, in an industrial facility right on the water. So this i s a n right in the port area, but the port area is connected to residential area in this city. So there are lots of people in this area lots of people filming from high rise buildings and so forth condos and office towers and whatnot that are in the area at this point, the cause of the explosion isn't fully known. Investigators are focusing on a s tock p ile of what they b elieve to be 2,750 metric, tons of ammonium nitrate. This isn't s in explosive material. So just for a bit of context, 2,750 metric tons in 1995, Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma city. And he used the same material to bring down a third of that building. And that explosion caused by two tons of ammonium nitrate. This is 2,750. So t he scale is enormous and right beside the facility that was housing, this this explosive material i s a fireworks storage.
Christine:Oh my god.
JJ:There's some understanding right now that those are likely connected, but that has not been fully determined yet. The explosion was so large that a 300,000 people lost their homes. The scale of this is enormous, so, okay. Let's dig in. What I'm going to do is I'm going to be I'm going to be watching some of this video as I describe it for you I'm going to go back and forth a bit and I'm going to do my best not to sensationalize this. It's some of the, the, the, the description of this is, is going to be extreme. These are it's, this is huge, but I'm going to do my best of course, to be keeping in mind that there are at least a hundred people killed and 4,000 people injured in this explosion. So with that in mind, the primary fire, the initial fire that's at this facility was wasn't ongoing concern. This was why people were filming. There's a large plume of thick smoke that cloud of smoke. That's rising up from this storage facility to ripe aside. The facility is a taller warehouse facility. So there's a low storage facility, which is on fire. And then beside it is a taller facility. I'm not sure if it's a, a mod, it's a boxy building, perhaps it's a, it's a grain storage I might've heard. And this is at an industrial area that is jutting out into the Eastern Mediterranean sea. So this is a built out piece of land in the port area. And again, this has been filmed from at least 14 different angles. I'm sure there are more videos floating around, but I've seen it from at least 14 different angles, some from the sea, some from downtown some from the ground, some from apartment and condo buildings. So there's a thick plume of smoke coming from this burning fire that is in a very low warehouse building. And it's hard to see much of the fire itself because there is so much thick, gray smoke pouring out. But what you can see are these flashes at the base of this fire, these flashes that look almost like sparks of lightning in a cloud in the sky. You'll sometimes see this, not, not when bolts of lightning are coming down, but when there's just there's electrical activity in a cloud, or if you're in an airplane flying above a, an electrical storm, you'll see the same type of thing. These sparks in side, this fire inside this cloud, I'm guessing this is just a guess that that would be the fireworks from the fireworks storage facility. Is that an effect you would normally see in a building fire, non a fire? Like, no, you would normally be seeing flickering of orange and and, and yellow flames, but not these sparks, not unless there's something very specific that is, that is burning like a firework or perhaps an extreme electrical fire. You might see some of this, but not typically in a regular and irregular fire which you expect to see these kinds of sparkling. And then as this plume of thick gray smoke is rising into the air. And that this plume of smoke is about the same size as the, as a nearby condo tower. So I'm guessing maybe this plume of stoke smoke is 30 stories tall. That's just a guess, but about that tall. Oh my God. And then suddenly there's a massive fireball explosion, just enormous, just absolutely monstrous that dwarfs these condo towers that are next to it. And it's, I've had to slow this down. So I'm going to describe this kind of in slow motion here, because it's happened so quickly. So this burst of flames and it starts off it's, it's almost like if you would imagine a sun exploding, cause it starts off spherical when you watch it in slow motion and it bursts out until it's, it just shoots into the air. So it starts off spherical. And when you pause the video at, at a moment when it's in this more spherical form you can see swirls of red and orange inside this, you know, these pause moments of, of fire fury and activity and movement, and it bursts to life, this massive fireball that encases the boxy building beside it, this bigger boxy building and almost instantaneously, there's a a shell of cloud that envelops this ball of flames. And this is the, this is a blast wave cloud I've since learned. And it's, so it completely encases the fireball. And then, and then spreads expands. And, and as it expands, it is, it moves into kind of the mushroom cloud, the classic mushroom cloud, which made some people mistakenly believed that maybe this was a nuclear event. It is not quite clearly lots of experts have said it is not this kind of cloud can occur in for lots of different kinds of explosions. So you've got a shell of cloud of white cloud around the fireball, and then it very quickly expands into a mushroom. So that, so it's a thicker at the top and thinner at the bottom. And then the ring, it kind of the mushroom cap becomes a ring that then spreads all throughout the city. And this is the blast wave that is expanding all throughout the city. And some of these videos are taken from one mile, two miles away. And when the explosion occurs and this blast wave, which is a blanket, a thick blanket of smoke and energy that is washing over the city, people who are filming these videos, ducked to the ground, they drop onto their floor. They run inside the, you know, videos get really chaotic and a second or two later, when the cloud washes past the person filming glass shatters, the rumble then comes because the sound of course, travels slower travels more slowly. So it catches up and, and, and then people are scrambling on the ground. They're screaming the glass shattering furniture blowing over, depending on how close you are to the event. And then hopefully the people who are filming get back up and they turn back and they start filming again, they turn their cameras, their phones back to the fire. And what's left instead of this gray plume of smoke that was there in the beginning. There's now an absolutely enormous red plume of smoke. It's like a Terra cotta color, and it is maybe two or three times as big as some of the nearby condos. Again, p erspective's difficult. It's a little hard to tell exactly how big, but it s eems enormous. And this is kind of the, this is what the initial f ireball turns into. It turns into this cloud of thick, thick, thick, red smoke. It looks absolutely solid. It doesn't look, it doesn't look fine or w ispy, or it is, it isn't a near solid object. It appears to be from a distance. And again, these are filmed from all over the city. So depending on where you are, there's going to be some slightly different visuals. Like if t here's, I saw one video, someone filmed from the street level. So there are you know, buildings on either side of the street and the person's filming and the explosion. Isn't what is focused on in this video, you see a bit of this flash and you see a bit of this this blast wave cloud, but what you really see, because there's a tunneling effect between these buildings is this cloud, this wave just w oo wash right over the camera operator. It's stunning. I have to say don't, I don't think the camera operator in that case likely survived.
Christine:I was thinking about, as you were saying so many different cameras and angles, and that if we have that video, I assume it meant it was because the person was able to hold onto their phone and survive and get out of the danger zone.
JJ:Yeah, I think, you know, yeah. In, in some cases it's clear that the person gets back up and they turn back around and they, and they continue to film. In some cases the images are that they end in, in visual chaos, they end with a phone being dropped or stepped on or glass shattering and, and that's, and that's it. And these videos get bounced around in, in such a way that you're not always seeing a post by the person who took the video. So it's hard to know. It's hard to know where it came from. And it's hard to know if the person who took that did in fact survive. I'm sure. In some cases they didn't,
Christine:I'm trying to follow the connect, the dots. Is it possible to film on your camera and be uploading it immediately? Like how does video get to the internet from a phone that got stepped on during the filming?
JJ:Well, that's a good question. I mean, some people could be a live streaming on Facebook and whatnot. There, there would be ways to do that. Some people might have if they, if they wound up in hospital with their phone, maybe someone else would take their phone and then of course upload these videos. Yeah.
Christine:It sounds like these images would be in a in a grotesque, but in escapable way hard to look away from. I could imagine just watching it over and over again, if only to try and take it in to take in the scale of it.
JJ:Yeah, absolutely. And there's something we are trained to like explosions in movies. And these are, this is the, this is the climax of action films. And, you know, so there's something about it that is that often when you see some smaller explosions, there's a, there's a fascinating kind of cinematic quality to them. This is actually on a scale that is larger than any cinematic explosion I've ever seen. It is just, it's just so massive because this was filmed because it's occurred in a port facility, there were people who were filming from the water. And some, some of those views offer it's the clearest view because there's nothing between the person filming and the explosion. There are no cities, there's no buildings. And you get a sense of this scale. You can see the explosion with the city behind and the buildings beside, and the scale you get the breadth of this blast wave cloud. So my understanding is that anything within a one mile radius of this explosion likely had a building collapse at least partially collapsed and everything within a two to six mile radius of the initial blast. You're having your windows blown in and there's more superficial damage to property, depending on how close, you know, at two miles, maybe you're talking about your windows coming in, maybe your car gets knocked and pushed maybe not flipped, but pushed. And then closer to six miles, you're getting more superficial damage to windows and and trees and so forth, but just monumental in scale. There's, there's a lot of rebel. So the, then the next wave of videos, some that people started filming immediately after, and some that have been coming in, in the however long it's been 18 hours or so since there are you, you get to see the devastation in this Portland area and in the adjacent residential area. So in one case, I saw a video that someone had shot from a building, and it looked like it was a building that was maybe under construction because the interior of the bill, there was no furniture or anything. There was a lot of material around, but no furniture, no, nothing like that. So someone's looking out through shattered windows at the the cityscape between between the building that's being filmed from Andy explosion. And all of the buildings are either fully leveled or partially leveled. They're just in absolute tatters. These are concrete buildings that have completely crumbled. You're seeing nothing, but like structural supports and, and, and frames and like, you know, rebar frames and bits of concrete hanging off of rebar. What I found really stunning about about these images is the color it's gray. Everything is gray because when all of this concrete is destroyed, when all of this concrete is, is broken, the gray dirt that falls, the debris, everything is covered in this layer of gray. It's a silty gray material that just covers everything. So the color is really quite stunning. And then the person who's filming comes back in their building. They, they film the under construction apartment and they go around to the back and they film the fronts of the buildings behind that were facing the explosion and the fronts of these building. These are apartment buildings and condo towers hard to tell exactly how tall they are, but, you know, mid rise to high rise buildings. And all of the windows are blown out. Every single window is blown out in these buildings. There's, there's dirt and debris kind of pressed into the concrete that is, that remains. And then he films down or he or she, they filmed down onto the ground. And and you see lines of cars, people trying to get out of the area, but they're having to weave through debris and overturned vehicles. And it's absolute chaos and devastation in this area, 300,000 people losing their homes. It was staggering.
Christine:One of my Mr. Rogers quotes that I go back to all the time is he describes being a kid and looking at horrible things on the news and his mother would help him process it by saying, look for the helpers. And so are you seeing images of, of what is being done to help people?
JJ:Yeah, that's lovely. There are there's a whole separate kind of cache of videos that people are posting and sharing, which are people in their homes looking after their kids. So people who have cameras in their houses, you know, nanny cams or security cameras, or whatever you want to call them that were just filming during this time. So not the videos that are looking at the, at the explosion, but the videos that are looking just at the house at the apartment, and these are people who, in several cases, they dive to their kids and they grabbed their kids and they pulled them in. And, and and you know, there's one video of, I saw a, of a man who's holding his, his whose child, and he's kind of running back and forth in his living room. Like not quite sure where to go, what to do. And I think in the end, I don't have the video up, but I believe what he does in the end is he takes the kid into a, into the kitchen and like them and puts them under the, under the counter, like puts them in a, in a cupboard under the counter. So there are videos like that that are going around. I haven't seen any of the videos so far that are of, as you say, that the helpers, the people who are, who are digging and the people who are searching, those are going to be, I think coming out, they're probably starting to come out now and be the next wave of, of image that comes out, those, those moments of, of heroism where people are, are digging and searching. There's also lots of videos of the injuries and you know, the hospitals and that, that kind of personal devastation that frankly, I, I try not to go down. I'm not entirely sure what the value is of those. I'm sure there's arguments to be made to that, that they're valuable. I'm not sure that's kind of the most helpful place to go.
Christine:I, I agree with that. And sometimes I think they're, they're important, but I also think if that was me, I wouldn't want to be the one yeah. On that film either. Exactly. yeah. When you were describing freeze framing and looking at the videos, sort of one frame at a time, I was thinking about how, how hard these images are to look at, but for you to have to parse them one frame at a time, that's, that's a level of, of viewing and analysis that most people don't don't have to do. So on behalf of me and the listeners, thank you for that, because it's hard enough to listen to, I don't know how you keep it together dissecting them and describing them for us. So thank you.
JJ:Thanks, Chris. Thanks. You know, with, with a video like this, it's in a, in a funny way, it's easier to, it's easier to separate yourself because it's, it's so big. And these videos are shot from a distance. So there is a, there is a, there feels like a physical separation as well as an emotional separation because of the scale. Sometimes it's the smaller, personal injustices and injuries that are that are really tough.