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Paula Ostieh writes in Asharq Al-Awsat:
The Beirut harbor landscape is not much different from the interior. The general panorama that can be seen from the “Charles Helou Highway” pier is almost the same from inside the harbor. But if the whole scene was more terrible and terrifying, but the details of the interior, the smells and the faces all tell stories that can only be heard up close.
The port area, which has become a military zone since the August 4 explosion, can only be entered with the permission of the Lebanese army, whose members guarding the entrance come across dozens of stories from that fateful day. One of them tells Al-Sharq Al-Awsat how the explosion threw him a great distance before hitting an iron wire that prevented him from being killed and hitting the ground, and then the bitter journey set out in search of his companions, who claims that eight of them died. The officer assures that everyone was aware of the presence of “chemical materials” in the hangar that exploded, “but we thought they were like other materials that enter the port daily.”
From the entrance to the port, to the waste of the wheat, which was severely damaged and the decision to demolish it, the area looks like scorched earth. Thousands of warehouses, cars completely destroyed and overcrowded, and piles of explosive debris filled the squares. As for the environment of the building, you feel that it is exclusively a place of death. The closer it got, the more explosive materials mixed with the smell of sewage and a lot of blood spilling there. Considering that the ammonium nitrate-containing amber was adjacent to the hallway building and had no trace, like the other adjacent districts. Its explosion resulted in a large crater covered in seawater, and thousands of birds flocked to it in search of the scattered wheat.
The visitor may think that this is the case of the port, before completing his way to the second semester designated for the unloading and loading of the merchandise, to imagine that he is now in another region or even in another country, since there the business is active and there is no impact whatsoever from the explosion. With gigantic heavy machinery unloading goods and hundreds of thousands of colorful containers, the scene became surreal, as death and destruction in the first section of the port mix with the hustle and bustle of life in the second section.
It only took a few days to get the port back into operation after the explosion. Today it is operating normally, as confirmed by Beirut’s Director General for Port Management and Investments, Basem Al-Qaisi. The container terminal, despite the presence of some broken cranes, received 200,000 containers from August 11 to 10 this month, which is the highest rate compared to the last two years. Corona, these businesses decreased by 60% in the ports of the world.
In a statement to Asharq Al-Awsat, Al-Qaisi noted that general cargo berths have regained their capacity at a rate ranging between 65 and 70%, so that grains and food are transported directly from ships to mills, while other materials are stored in resilient buildings in the free zone that have suffered extensive damage. Currently, the owners of some buildings are repairing and maintaining them, which has led to their re-establishment of activity, at a rate that ranges between 60 and 70%.
The port basically lost a large part of the pavilions and offices as a result of the explosion, including the “customs clearance” offices, so the works that were being carried out on the port campus were transferred to the airport.
The army, in cooperation with the Civil Defense, continues to survey the area, sifting and inspecting containers that were not received by their owners, especially those containing hazardous materials. According to the head of Parliament’s Working Committee, MP Nazih Najm, there are currently 52 containers out of 163 that have been handled by the army that contain flammable and explosive goods since 2009, and the Supreme Defense Council has assigned a private German company to get rid of them. The director general of the port indicates that the army isolated these containers in a safe place, and they were handed over to the Germans, who have been working since last week to analyze them, package them and transport them out of the country.
Along with the removal of these and other containers and the start of repair and restoration of some pavilions and buildings, a serious discussion began among stakeholders about the future of the port and its role. In a statement to Asharq Al-Awsat, Najm believes that “the cost of returning the port to what it was is not huge, but we are supposed to first define what we want from the port of Beirut. If we want it to play a competitive role in the region after recent developments, then it is assumed that it will expand and develop studies to convert “In part it is tourist, and gasoline and gas tanks are placed in a new berth, provided that all this It is discussed in a workshop that the government starts up as soon as it is installed in cooperation with international companies, especially since the port is capable of contributing billions of dollars to the public treasury if we invest it well. “
Former Minister Fadi Abboud is firmly pushing for the transformation of the port of Beirut into a tourist port, especially after the recent tragedy, by “building a monument to the victims to honor them and establishing public parks, galleries and museums, whenever a new commercial port to the north between the regions of Dora and Tripoli, or to the south between Choueifat and Jiyeh. In a statement to Al-Sharq al-Awsat, denouncing: How do you build a commercial port on a million square meters of the most expensive land, so that the value of the land there today ranges between 5 and 10 billion dollars ? And he highlighted the need to establish a new port on less expensive land in order to compete with neighboring countries in the next stage.
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