Large explosion in Beirut

"In November 2018, I was away from Beirut, briefly, for work. One morning I woke up to find a deluge of WhatsApp messages from various friends and relatives, all forwarding the same few videos. There had been a terrible storm. At one point, hail the size of fists had fallen. In one of the videos, shoppers run screaming as it smashes into the courtyard of a fancy mall. In another, a woman holds up a plastic chair on her balcony, so punched through with holes it looks like Swiss cheese. There are brutalized cars, felled trees and electricity poles, a man water-skiing on the northern coastal highway, mudslides in the quarries. The last was of the boulevard overlooking Ramlet el-Baida beach. The water was almost hip-deep, if the drowned cars parked on the side of the road were anything to measure by.

But it wasn’t water: it was shit. Exploding so forcefully up from the depths that the sewer covers danced atop the flumes, like in a cartoon. Yes, Eden Bay, and all its enablers, had caused a literal shitstorm."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushroom_cloud