Following the 2020 Beirut port explosion, the city's grain silos suffered a prolonged period of steady ruination. To understand how the gradual destruction of a ruin happened behind state cordons in the nearly two-year period since the blast, Febrayer and FA reconstructed the site to present a unified account of the state’s mismanagement of this important site of material evidence and memory.

This investigation examines the validity of the most widely accepted theory to explain what triggered the deadly blast in the port of Beirut on 4 August 2020. Lebanese and international authorities, as well as the FBI and the Lebanese Internal Security, claimed the fire that in turn instigated the explosion was caused by the shoddy work of Syrian welders—but our analysis challenges these claims.

The explosions that ripped through the port of Beirut in 2020 devastated the city, leaving as many as 300,000 homeless. Following calls for an independent investigation, we mapped the contents of the warehouse where the blast originated and the spread of fire that instigated it, and have released our 3D models of the incident as a free resource for investigators and civil society.