Impacts of 2020 Beirut Explosion on Port Infrastructure and Nearby Buildings
Publication: Natural Hazards Review
Volume 23, Issue 2
Abstract
At 18:08 on August 4, 2020, a large explosion occurred at Hangar 12 in the Port of Beirut. The size of the explosion was equivalent to that of an earthquake with a local magnitude () of 3.3 according to the USGS. As one of the largest nonmilitary explosions to ever impact an urban region, this event provides unprecedented opportunities to document explosion impacts on urban infrastructure. To facilitate this data collection, the Geotechnical Extreme Events Reconnaissance (GEER) Association coordinated a multiagency response directed toward the collection of perishable data of engineering interest. Two main categories of infrastructure systems were impacted: the Port of Beirut and the Beirut building stock. Within the Port, the explosion triggered a quay wall failure and flow slide, and strongly impacted grain silo structures that were in close proximity to Hangar 12. Within the city, historical masonry structures, older reinforced concrete structures, and modern high-rise structures were impacted. Through a combination of in-person inspections and street-view surveys, we collected data on structural performance (including damage to load-bearing elements) and building façades. Performance levels were classified according to procedures applied following earthquakes (for structural performance) and newly proposed procedures (for façades). We describe spatial distributions of these damage types and dependencies on source distance and location-to-explosion direction. We demonstrate that physical damages correlated with damage proxy maps produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Earth Observatory of Singapore based on Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite synthetic aperture radar data, with a stronger correlation with structural damage than with façade damage.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code generated or used during the study are available in a repository online in accordance with funder data retention policies. The damage proxy map used in this study was retrieved from the NASA-JPL ARIA event page at https://aria-share.jpl.nasa.gov/20200804-Beirut_Blast/ (last accessed June 2021). Locations of 360° photos taken in October 2020, detailed structural damage assessment information for 172 buildings based on in-person inspection within a month of the explosion, exterior structural damage assessment information for 10 buildings based on 360° photos taken in October 2020, and façade damage assessment data based on using 360° photos taken in October 2020 are available in DesignSafe (Sadek et al. 2021b; https://doi.org/10.1007/s00193-020-00970-z). All 360° photos are available in Mapillary (https://www.mapillary.com/app/?lat=33.90191008577155&lng=35.49106252100046&z=14.512378027628445) and Beirut Recovery websites (https://beirutrecovery.org/). For both websites, photos can be visualized after selecting user: aubmsfea in the main menu. Building polygons are from the Beirut Urban Lab (available at: https://beirut-built-environment-database-bul-aub.hub.arcgis.com/).
Acknowledgments
The GEER Association is supported in part by the National Science Foundation through the Geotechnical Engineering Program under Grant No. CMMI-1826118. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the US Government. The GEER Association is made possible by the vision and support of the NSF Geotechnical Engineering Program Directors Dr. Richard Fragaszy and the late Dr. Cliff Astill. GEER members also donate their time, talent, and resources to collect time-sensitive field observations of the effects of extreme events. Part of the research was sponsored by the NASA Earth Science Disasters Program (Grant No. 18-DISASTER18-0034) and performed in collaboration with Sang-Ho Yun of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. Many people contributed to the reconnaissance reported here. They are listed in the Acknowledgments section of Sadek et al. (2021a). We would like to call special attention to Mr. Emmanuel Durand (Amann Engineering, Geneva) for generously sharing his time and monitoring data. We appreciate the constructive comments provided by the anonymous reviewers of this paper.
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Received: Jul 22, 2021
Accepted: Nov 22, 2021
Published online: Mar 2, 2022
Published in print: May 1, 2022
Discussion open until: Aug 2, 2022
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