Climbing out from the depths of hell four years after Beirut Port explosion

Four years after a massive explosion ripped Beirut apart, the scars have yet to heal. Colin Sheridan talks to one family rebuilding their lives after the death of their two-year-old son

A 25m steel sculpture, 'The Gesture', created by Lebanese artist Nadim Karam from the debris of the blast at the port of Lebanon's capital Beirut on August 4, 2020. Picture: Joseph Eid/AFP via Getty

At 6.07pm on August 4, 2020, Beirut was calm, and very, very hot.

The streets, empty for so long because of covid restrictions, had returned to a normality commensurate with the city’s reputation for elegant chaos.

It was Tuesday, but days of the week matter little in Lebanon in the summertime. Soon, the sun would set and the corniche would be packed with families enjoying the epic twilight.

Not long after that, the restaurants of Gemmayzee would empty and the bars of Mar Mikhel would fill up with the beautiful and the damned.

In a city of very few certainties, beautiful sunsets and plentiful negronis were two of them.

It had been a brutal 12 months in Lebanon. The previous October, a people’s protest swept the country, briefly toppling the ruling elite.

The early optimism of that autumn uprising eventually gave way to a crippling sense of fatigue and eventual despair, especially among the young, educated population.

The Lebanese pound tanked in value, falling by over 80%. Depositors were denied access to their savings.

The American dollar, for so long pegged against the local currency, soared in value, causing greater disparity between the country’s wealthy and everybody else.

This was before the global pandemic hit, stretching an already buckling healthcare system to breaking point.

An estimated 1.5m Syrian refugees reside in a country the size of Ireland, while hundreds of thousands more Palestinians live stateless in refugee camps.

In that context, on that Tuesday evening in August, things were about as good as could be expected. There was life about Beirut again. Maybe not quite hope, but a delicate détente from the endless entropy. 

As those who lived there know, all the city needs to survive is the whiff of a better tomorrow.

What came next obliterated that. A 6.08pm, Beirut exploded. A fire at the port caused the detonation of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, which had been improperly stored in a port warehouse for six years.

Across the west of the city, shutters were ripped from window frames and turned into projectiles, flying across apartments, taking chunks out of walls on the opposite side of rooms.

Every window shattered, shards of glass becoming lethal arrows. Cars coke-canned on the street, the nuance of the blast meaning it first blew through everything in its wake, before violently sucking the air out. As a singular event, it was utterly devastating.

Everybody who was in Beirut that evening has a story. Of being blown across balconies. Of seeing something in the sky moments before the explosion.

Of searching rubblised apartments for loved ones and cats (in Beirut, the same thing). Of their children, lured to open windows by what they thought were fireworks, flung like rag dolls across their homes.

It seems like a miracle that only 220 people died that night. But there is nothing miraculous for the loved ones of those who did. For them, August 4 is a date from the depths of a living hell from which it is a daily challenge to climb out of.

Isaac Oehlers playing in the garden. Picture: Sarah Copland

Isaac Oehlers was sitting in his highchair, eating his dinner in Achrafieh, about 750m from the port. His mother Sarah Copland remembers that he had been at garderie (nursery) that day, because he came home in different clothes from the ones he wore in. Not unusual for a two-year-old boy. Neither was being a little bit naughty.

“I remember, in the last moments before it happened, being a little bit cross with him. I was sitting alongside his highchair, feeding him his dinner, and I was losing my patience. It was the last thing between us.”

Isaac was hit by a single shard of glass in his tiny heart. His father Craig had been in the bathroom when their lives exploded.

Sarah was cut and bleeding. Together, they wrapped Isaac in a towel and ran to the street below, now the epitome of a warzone.

They stood in the middle of the road and screamed at passing cars to stop. Understandably, in the frantic aftermath of such a seismic event, anybody lucky enough to be in a vehicle that worked was attempting to flee whatever it was that was happening.

Nobody on the ground had any idea what caused the blast. Most believed it was a series of airstrikes or car bombs, and so were naturally anticipating another. Nobody passing the family could have known Isaac’s condition.

Craig and Sarah helping Isaac to celebrate his birthday. Picture: Sarah Copland

Still, one car stopped, taking Isaac and his parents.

“The man driving the car had no English or French, and I had no Arabic. But he understood we just needed to get to a hospital. He drove around traffic and over sidewalks.”

Sarah, Craig, and Isaac were not alone in the car. The man’s wife and two kids were there also, something Sarah still struggles to process.

“I often think of that man. His wife. Their children. What trauma they went through with us in the car. They got us to the hospital. I have no idea who they are, and we never saw them again.”

Sarah was quickly separated from Isaac by doctors, as they dressed her wounds and checked the health of her unborn baby. Mother and son were apart when Isaac died a little later that night.

Under advice from her doctors, Sarah never went back to their apartment in Beirut. I knew Sarah a little then, and I recall seeing the photograph of Isaac’s highchair in the immediate aftermath.

For all the horror that befell Beirut that evening, it remains the image that haunts me the most. A friend who had to attend the scene afterwards in an official capacity recalls being physically sick.

Isaac's highchair in the aftermath of the blast. Picture: Sarah Copland

It took Sarah and Craig 10 days to leave Lebanon and return to Australia, little Isaac accompanying them on the long, tortuous flight home.

As if the burden of grief and trauma was not enough, they then had to isolate in Perth for two weeks as part of Australia’s covid protocol.

“It still seems so unfair and surreal,” reflects Sarah, “we went from a happy family eating our dinner together on a summer’s evening to suddenly being torn apart, our baby boy ripped from us.

“Before I could even breathe we were back in Australia, living in a city I had never lived in in my life.”

Sarah does not quite know how, but two months after Isaac’s death, she gave birth to his little brother, Ethan.

Baby Levi followed two years later. The family has relocated to Melbourne, where Isaac is omnipresent in their lives.

She is grateful for the support she has received from the Australian NGO Red Nose which provides free counselling to parents who have suffered the death of a child. She is grateful, too, to the people of Lebanon and Beirut who have never forgotten her son.

“There are so many people there who won’t let Isaac’s memory die, and for that I am thankful. They carry his picture everywhere.

“It’s weird. I kind of wish I was there this weekend [for the anniversary], to grieve with the other families. We feel so removed from it here.”

Copland, who had previously worked at UN HQ in New York and at the International Criminal Court, was employed at the Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia in Beirut.

Her professional experiences had made her all too aware of the bureaucracy and red tape that often hamper complicated investigations.

Yet, despite it being four years, there has been zero justice for Sarah, Craig, Isaac, and all the other victims of the Beirut port explosion.

Last year, Australia took the lead at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, on behalf of 38 countries, in demanding a “swift, impartial, credible, and transparent investigation” into the blast. There seemed to be a small amount of momentum then, but, depressingly, political inefficacy and world events have, once again, seen that momentum disappear.

“It’s cruel. For everybody. It’s almost like we have not begun to properly grieve. I understand the attention of the world being elsewhere given what’s happening in Gaza and Ukraine, but it shouldn’t work like that. 

Justice should not work this way. Victims should not have to fight for attention.”

Isaac with Sarah on a family holiday. Picture: Sarah Copland

At least 220 people were killed that evening, 7,000 were injured and 300,000 displaced. The blast was so powerful it was felt in Cyprus, 250km away.

Save for those who were there, its anniversary will likely pass off with little attention. A sad indictment of the state of the world, and a brutal reminder that justice never comes looking for those who most deserve it.

The passage of time, too, brings with it the painful contradiction of watching people forget and the agony of trying to keep the most traumatic memory of your life alive.

Copland is pessimistic that any progress will happen anytime soon, while remaining cognisant of what she herself regards as her relative privilege in the midst of such a horrific tragedy.

“We could leave and come home to the support of our families. We live in relative certainty nothing like this should happen again.”

That privilege, too, is tinged with an acute sadness.

“We loved Lebanon. It was ripped from us. Craig and I loved travelling, too, it was a huge part of our lives. Losing Isaac how we lost him has changed all of that.

“I think someday we will go back. That was Isaac’s world. So many moments and memories.

“So many things that were part of us were so suddenly destroyed. Some day. Just not yet.”