-This is Sarah Dadouch.
I'm a Washington Post correspondent, based in Beirut.
I'm standing in the middle of absolute wreckage.
-Exactly a week after the massive blast that injured
thousands, damaged buildings, and killed more than 170 people,
Dadouch reported from the Beirut port,
where the explosion went off.
-Towering over us is a very big silo
that used to be filled with corn.
One of its big pipes still has a very orange mound of corn,
but the rest is spilled out into the side
and almost going into the water.
There's mounds of dirt and sea sand everywhere.
There's a cookbook that lies in the rubble --
spaghetti squash with clam and mushroom sauce.
There's chunks of rubble and a lot of human personal belongings
like different foodstuffs, personal items like calendars,
Popsicles, someone's red nylon shorts.
Now in the middle of a craterlike hole,
under a lot of twisted car metal,
a bunch of Civil Defense, both French and Lebanese,
are looking for what could be a body.
-On the day of the massive blast,
on August 4th, around 6:00 PM,
Dadouch was in her apartment, just half a mile away.
And a little further from the port,
half a mile south from Dadouch, Karim Sakhn
was working in his bike shop.
-Yeah, I was inside.
I was fixing a bicycle. I heard the first blast.
I ran outside, and when I saw from where the smoke was coming,
I said, "This is from the port."
I took my phone, I put an airplane mode on my phone,
because so no one can contact me while I'm filming.
-We first saw photos and reports of the explosion,
and I got up and got dressed to go check it out.
Thankfully, wore long jeans,
which proved to be very helpful later.
And as I was getting up to find socks,
I felt the entire building tremble.
-And the second I pressed to record the blast,
the big one came out in front of my face and threw me.
-And then watched as my windows and doors
just started getting torn off their hinges and flying around.
There was glass everywhere.
-2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been stored
at a port warehouse since 2014 had exploded.
[explosion] -Ammonium nitrate, first of all,
it was developed as a fertilizer.
And over the years, the blasting industry found out
that that would also work as a blasting agent.
It takes a high explosive to set off ammonium nitrate.
But if you have a heavy fire that starts near it,
that will also set off the ammonium nitrate.
-It's uncertain what caused the initial fire
that triggered the massive explosion, but Ludwiczak,
who has been working in the explosives industry
since 1972, said there's a specific way
you handle an ammonium nitrate fire.
-The rule in the industry is,
if you have an ammonium nitrate fire,
you get the hell out of there.
You don't ever fight an ammonium nitrate fire.
Depending upon how large that is,
get them out of there within a quarter of a mile,
a half-mile, or a mile,
and let that fire either consume the ammonium nitrate,
or let it detonate and get out of the way,
but don't ever fight a fire that's in ammonium nitrate,
because it's probably going to explode.
People have been killed trying to fight these fires
when it explodes.
-The first explosion and the second,
much larger explosion,
that sent a giant mushroom- shaped cloud over the city,
happened within 15 minutes of each other.
Unaware of the risk,
firefighters tried to extinguish the initial fires.
All 10 of the Beirut Fire Brigade members
who were at the scene died in the blast.
Sahar Fares' body was recovered, and her funeral was aired
on Lebanese television on August 6th.
-I don't think they'll ever come up
with the amount of people that were really killed.
I hate to say this, but I said a lot of people close to that
were probably vaporized by that explosion.
The people that were around it and survived that are lucky.
-I still don't know how I wasn't more seriously injured,
or injured at all beyond minor cuts and bruises.
-On August 7th, Dadouch reported
from the funeral of a Beirut resident
who was killed by the blast in a friend's apartment
that was close to Saint George Hospital.
-His family was leaning over the coffin, crying.
His mom kept saying, "Who's going to help me now?
Who's going to help me?
-Dadouch also visited her neighborhood.
-Buildings that weren't structurally sound
to begin with are collapsing.
The building right next door to mine
is on the verge of collapsing.
They may have to bring it down,
which means our building may fall down,
so they're not allowing a lot of people to enter yet.
-My bicycle shop, like, comparing to other people,
I can say that nothing happened.
I can say it resisted the impact.
I have some damage in the structure,
but my shop is made of metal, of steel.
I really consider myself lucky.
-It's estimated that the destruction
could take billions of dollars to repair,
and 300,000 people have been left homeless.
-These storage areas should not be in an area
where people live or congregate.
You need to put them out in the middle of nowhere.
We have, in the industry, in the United States,
a storage limitation.
If you have "X" amount of product sitting there,
you have to have it "X" amount of feet away from the road
and "X" amount of feet away from housing.
This wasn't.
This is in the middle of, you know,
for lack of a better term, almost a residential area.
This is atrocious to have that here.
-And I don't know if you're aware
of Lebanon's economic situation.
Many people cannot, like,
don't have access to their cash in the banks.
You have a deep economic crisis, and now this and with COVID-19,
really, like, you feel hell on Earth was what happened.
-Since the blast, protests have erupted and persist in Beirut.
On August 10th, Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab
and his entire government resigned.
But the search for bodies continues as the city mourns
and rebuilds.
Back at the site of the explosion,
Dadouch documents the recovery efforts happening around her.
This is the location she was about to head to,
from her apartment.
-The Lebanese Civil Defense think they've found something.
They're wondering if there's a helmet stuck inside.
-[speaking Lebanese] -He says it's something else
and asks the machine to keep going.
Now he's asking them to flip the car over
so they can take a better look.
They didn't find a body in the car.
The men in hard hats and uniforms
just try to pull away whatever they can from the wreckage,
in order to find one of the many missing,
but there is no hope that anyone would be alive.