- 09:35
While reports pile up on the table of the Council of Ministers, Ici Beyrouth went in undercover, returned to the foot of the gutted silos and questioned scientists and doctors in order to understand what is still polluting the capital’s air, what risks local residents are running, and why decontamination is stalling.
On 4 August 2020, Beirut exploded a first time, in a flash of ammonium nitrate, debris and shattered glass. Since then, the city has continued to explode in a muffled way: in the bronchi of the inhabitants, in the lungs of the children of Karantina, in the gutted silos that spit back out heat, smoke and dust.
Last Thursday, the file came back onto the table of the Council of Ministers at the Grand Serail. On the agenda, around twenty items… and, between two routine chapters, the intervention of the Minister of the Environment, Tamara el-Zein. She presented to her colleagues a topographical and environmental study commissioned from the National Council for Scientific Research on the port silos: weakened structure, pockets of fermenting grain that continue to give off heat and fumes, clearly identified environmental and structural risks.
Rather than announcing a schedule of works, the executive chose the well-known path of Lebanese crises: the creation of a committee tasked with “proposing the necessary measures”. Political result: one more committee. Concrete result: on the ground, it is still the local residents who serve as particle sensors.
What are we still breathing around the silos?
What one breathes around the port cannot be reduced to a bad smell of burnt wheat. It is a multi-layered mixture.
First, the dust of the ruins: fragments of concrete, stripped-off paint, metals and ageing construction materials. The shock wave of 2020 pulverised a section of the city; the dust fell back down on the facades, balconies and streets. At each gust of wind, part of this solid cloud rises back into the air.
Next, the cereals stuck in the cells. Thousands of tons of damaged wheat and corn have never been completely removed. Soaked with water and then heated, these grains behave like a vertical compost: they ferment, give off heat and can, at certain moments, catch fire. These plumes of smoke have already been seen reappearing above the port, before the collapse of entire sections of the silos.
Third layer, more invisible: the microscopic flora that thrives on this rotten wheat. Specialists in environmental health and mycology describe this type of environment – warm, humid, confined – as ideal for the development of fungi such as *Aspergillus* or *Penicillium*. Their spores, a veritable “living dust”, detach themselves from the grains, mix with the mineral particles and travel with the wind well beyond the port enclosure.
Finally, there remain the intermittent fumes, coming from the fermentation and from sources of combustion inside the cells. On site, the teams describe the same picture: persistent heat, acrid odours, occasional clouds. Around the silos, the air is therefore not only laden with memory: it is saturated with a stubborn cocktail of dust, spores and fumes.
Lungs on the front line
In the short term, this mixture translates into symptoms that the inhabitants of the neighbouring districts know by heart: stinging in the eyes, scratchy throat, dry cough, headaches, tightness in the chest. Asthmatics and patients already suffering from chronic respiratory diseases describe flare-ups of symptoms at each episode of strong odour or visible smoke.
Fine particles penetrate deep into the airways and worsen pre-existing pathologies. But the most insidious component, pulmonologists and allergists emphasise, is the biological dimension. Fungal spores coming from mouldy grains, inhaled in a repeated way, can trigger respiratory allergies, asthma attacks, infections in vulnerable people, as well as irritations of the skin and eyes.
“The question is not whether a massive toxic cloud is going to suddenly descend on Beirut, but what small repeated aggressions over years do to the lungs of the most vulnerable: children, elderly people, respiratory patients,” analyses pulmonologist and allergist Carole Youakim, who follows this type of profile at Mount Lebanon Hospital.
For her, the pollution around the silos looks like a health iceberg: “Each resurgence of odours, each visible plume of smoke, is the emerged part. Underneath, there are months of micro-exposure that do not make the front page, but that we see very clearly in consultation,” she insists.
On top of this respiratory burden is superimposed a psychological burden. For the inhabitants of the devastated districts, each smoke above the port, each smell of burning, is a brutal return to 4 August. Post-traumatic stress, anxiety, insomnia add to the weight of the particles. The same populations are taking the hits on two fronts.
Why decontamination is stalling
On the technical level, Lebanon is not facing a scientific enigma. Engineers, urban planners and specialists in hazardous waste have already sketched out the broad outlines of a plan.
It would first be a matter of treating the grains as a real health risk: evacuating them gradually, under confinement and with strict protections for workers, instead of letting them ferment in the concrete. Then of securing and demolishing in a controlled way the most unstable sections of the silos, limiting as much as possible the dispersion of dust towards the neighbouring districts. Finally, of cleaning up the soils, managing the rubble and installing sensors measuring continuously the quality of the air around the port, with public data.
The political dimension remains: what should be done with this concrete carcass? Preserving part of it as a memorial to 4 August, yes, but not at the price of prolonged exposure of local residents. For the moment, between ministries passing the buck to one another, interests around the future of the port and the State’s chronic paralysis, the file is moving forward at the pace of commissions and communiqués. The latest scientific report acknowledges environmental and structural risks, the official response boils down to the creation of one more committee.
The city, for its part, cannot be content with waiting for the next meeting report. In 2020, the entire world discovered the port of Beirut in a fraction of a second, in a flash of ammonium nitrate. In 2025, the capital continues to breathe what is left of it, in slow motion, in a cloud of particles and spores that nobody films. As long as the State contents itself with creating committees while the inhabitants serve as free air filters, one question will remain hanging over the silos: in Lebanon, what is really destined to rot on the spot – the wheat, the concrete… or public health?
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