Lessons Learned

Abstract

On August 4, 2020, just after 6 p.m., an intense fire broke out at Hangar 12 in the Port of Beirut. Unbeknownst to the nearly 100,000 people who lived within 1.6 km of the warehouse, Hangar 12 was storing everything needed to make a bomb. The fire started a chain reaction, beginning with the activation of fireworks and finishing with the detonation of ammonium nitrate. According to researchers, around 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was stored in Hangar Researchers and engineers from the American University of Beirut personally inspected and assessed individual structures throughout the city to quantify damage. The Port of Beirut explosion resulted in a substantial amount of experimental data to be used in comparing expected and actual performance of buildings under an extreme blast event.