A journalist in Beirut has said yesterday’s explosion at the city’s port rattled his entire body from kilometres away.

Over half the Lebanese city was damaged after the huge explosion yesterday afternoon and officials have estimated the damage at €3bn.

At least 100 people are known to have died and 4,000 people were injured in the blast according to Lebanon’s Red Cross.

Local authorities have said the explosion came after a huge store of ammonium nitrate caught fire in a warehouse.

The damage after a massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, 05-08-2020. Image: Hassan Ammar/AP/Press Association Images

On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, local journalist Habib Battah, founder of the Beirut Report website, said he very nearly got caught up on the explosion himself.

“I consider myself quite lucky because I was passing by the port area about ten minutes before the explosions,” he said.

“I had just stopped a few kilometres from the port at a pharmacy and I heard a distant thud. I thought it was an airplane, like a sonic boom, because we have so many planes flying over Lebanon. We have been bombed many times by Israel so I thought it was that.

Stunning video shows explosions just minutes ago at Beirut port pic.twitter.com/ZjltF0VcTr

— Borzou Daragahi 🖊🗒 (@borzou) August 4, 2020

“My eyes shot to the skies to scan them but I didn’t see anything. I turned my face back to the pharmacist and then boom, my whole body just got pushed back. I felt it in my bones, it just rattled your whole body, the shockwave.

“It sounded like the building just next to me collapsed. It sounded so close and everybody felt that. Everybody felt it had happened to them because this wave really reverberated over every surface in the blast area.”

The damage after a massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon, 05-08-2020. Image: Bilal Hussein/AP/Press Association Images

Mr Battah said people all over the city panicked after the blast.

“My heart was in my throat and I just jumped in my car and tried to race home,” he said. “People were driving erratically and everyone was outside their house wherever I looked. It was a very traumatic experience and really a flashback to so many other bombs and wars we have been through in this country.”

The explosion came as Lebanon struggles with a spiralling economic crisis – with the local currency dropping 80% in value in recent months.

Meanwhile, granaries near the port held the vast majority of the country’s grain supplies prompting fears of a looming food crisis.

Mr Battah said the port was the “lifeline of the country.”

“It is a small country that relies on imports,” he said. “That port is a key part of the economy and the economy at this point has taken a nose dive and is collapsing so it couldn’t have come at a worse time and I don’t know how it could be rebuilt.

“A lot of money was invested to rebuild that port after the civil war and now there are many container ships heading for Lebanon and we don’t know where they are going to go.

“People are relying on those container ships just for food and wheat. We are not in any way self-sufficient in this country. That whole area is devastated and I don’t know how it can be rebuilt. We are talking about dozens of warehouses just flattened.”