Smoke rises above the devastation in Beirut, Lebanon, on Aug. 4, 2020. Two explosions, the second much bigger than the first, rocked the city’s port area, killing at least 100 and injuring thousands.
Credit: © Houssam Shbaro, Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

On August 4, two deadly explosions rocked Beirut, Lebanon. More than 100 people were killed, and thousands were injured. The blasts were compared in power to an earthquake, because people hundreds of miles or kilometers away felt the explosions.

No one knows exactly how the first blast occurred. It may have been caused by stored fireworks. The second explosion was likely caused by a highly explosive chemical called ammonium nitrate. There was a 2,750-ton (2,500-metric ton) stockpile of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse in the area, near the city’s port. The chemical is often used in fertilizer. Fertilizer is a substance that is added to soil to help plants grow.

Lebanon is a small country at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea and the western end of Asia. It has been a center of transportation and trade for over 100 years. Beirut is Lebanon’s capital and largest city. About half of the country’s people live in the Beirut area.

The blasts damaged many businesses and homes. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced (forced to leave their homes). The devastation and destruction reminded many residents of the country’s decades-long civil war. A civil war takes place between people of the same country. Political differences between groups of Lebanese Christians and Muslims erupted into civil war in the mid-1970′s. Other rival groups also engaged in fighting. The conflicts caused much death, destruction, and damage to the country’s economy. A peace plan ended most of the fighting in 1991.

The explosions occurred while the entire world was struggling with the COVID-19 pandemic (global outbreak of disease). Hospitals that were reserved for patients suffering from coronavirus shifted to treating people injured by the blasts. In the explosion zone and elsewhere, people continued to search for missing friends, family, and others.

July 9, 2013

On July 6, a run-away train with more than 70 crude-oil tanker cars derailed in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, triggering an enormous explosion. At least 15 people are known dead and 60 others are missing, feared dead. As many as 30 buildings were destroyed in the blast, including the town grocery and library. The tankers, en route from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota to a refinery in New Brunswick, carried pressurized crude oil. Fires from the massive explosion forced the evacuation of about 2,000 of the town’s 6,000 residents.

Yesterday, officials learned that the train—parked outside Nantes, a town 8 miles (12 kilometers) west of Lac-Megantic, during an overnight driver shift-change—started rolling downhill on empty tracks just minutes after firemen had extinguished a blaze in one of its locomotives. “About five minutes after the firemen left, I felt the vibration of a train moving down the track,” eyewitness Andre Gendron told Reuters news service yesterday. “I then saw the train move by without its lights on.” Reuters also reported that Nantes Fire Chief Patrick Lambert confirmed that his crew had switched off the locomotive late on July 5 while putting out a “good-sized” blaze in the motor. “Our protocol calls for us to shut down an engine because it is the only way to stop the fuel from circulating into the fire,” he noted.

In a diesel-electric locomotive, an air compressor runs off the diesel engine and keeps the locomotive’s brakes charged and working. When a locomotive is shut down, its brakes will eventually cease to function. (Electro-Motive Division of General Motors Corporation-World Book diagram)

According to the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MM&A) Railway, the engineer parked the train in Nantes on July 5, but left one locomotive running to ensure the air brakes worked properly. “If the operating locomotive is shut down, there’s nothing left to keep the brakes charged up, and the brake pressure will drop finally to the point where they can’t be held in place any longer,” MM&A railroad chairman Ed Burkhardt told the Toronto Star newspaper.