BEIRUT: Ghassan Hasrouty spent most of his life working at the silos in Beirut’s port, unloading grain shipments to feed the country even as fighting raged around him during the 1975 to 1990 civil war.

Decades later, he perished under the same silos, their towering cement structure gutted by the force of the Aug 4 explosion at the port, when 2,750 tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrates ignited in what became one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history.