Translated Content:
On Saturday night, the eighth night of the war, at around 10:30, from a distance in the northwestern part of Tehran, the fire and yellow and red flames of the Shahran oil depot were in front of my eyes. The night before, I had witnessed the burning of Mehrabad Airport from there, just before one in the morning, and now time was moving forward so that I could witness the explosions up close and experience the tremors of the earth and time again in my eyes, ears, and mind.
According to Etemad, I had been hearing the whistling sound that had reached my ears after the explosion of the Shahran oil depot during the 12-day war less often these days, and apparently I had been distracted by it. A few months ago, an otolaryngologist said that the nerves in one of my ears had probably been damaged by the sound and wave of the explosion, and nothing could be done about it. Maybe it would heal on its own, maybe not.
Then he continued with regret and impatience that many people had developed this problem after the 12-day war. On Saturday night, around 11:00 PM, while I was trying to record the successive explosions and fires at the oil depot in southern Tehran from where I was standing, time and space were stitched together and I saw that thick yellow light again, how it attacked my eyes. At the same time, a terrible roar echoed through my head and body.
Of course, these are words; how can one describe the sound of an explosion and its spread in the air when the sky and the earth are raining fire at the same time. I threw myself on the ground and heard how two more explosions hit my soul like two hammer blows or sledgehammers, or rather, as if they were hitting my skull. At the same time, the continuous whistle that had distracted me also returned to my ears.
They say; you have to decide in the moment, but at that moment, wandering between doors and walls, I took refuge in my phone, oh no! Like the Twelve-Day War and the days of January, and like all citizens, I did not have internet and could only access the local or national internet, so there was no news of the moment-by-minute news on the dominant social networks.
I ran to get ready to leave, while at the same time I was saying to myself; Am I in danger? I reached the balcony and from there I could see some people quickly jumping out of buildings and getting into cars. Some were leaving the place or stopping there to see how the situation was going.
It seemed to me that they were better prepared than they were during the Twelve-Day War, when they were surprised by the explosion at the Shahran oil depot and were inexperienced in facing it. They did not wander as they did then, for example, they did not go to the scene of the fire. The same people who were wandering around the streets and alleys on that hot night in June were calmer now.
I was talking from the balcony about how much staying calm could prevent the damage of the accident or the damage that followed. When I turned my head, black and dirty giants were splashing into the sky from the oil depot. Tehran was no longer the same city it was before the war, with smoke and fire coming out of every corner.
Another oil depot in the direction of Kohak had been hit by a rocket, and its smoke was also spreading into the sky and air of Tehran. As I looked at the smoke trail, two cars with flashing blue and red lights passed by the street and said; evacuate, evacuate the houses.
It was time to leave, so I quickly left the place. Almost everyone in the alley and street had left, although a few people remained at home and some were on the boulevard. Every now and then there was an explosion, flames flared, and the light fell on the buildings in front.
The fire is more widespread than last time, and apparently this time at least what was in the tanks was more than the previous time, and the sound of oil products exploding inside the tanks can be heard continuously in the area. Some of the gasoline and oil flowed into the streets and waterways, so the fire also reached the streets.
An hour later, the fire brigade took control of the fire, and apparently the initial crisis was gone, so some people returned to their homes. The night was terrifying, and at 8 am, several people calling from different parts of Tehran were talking about the dark air in the city.
From the balcony overlooking the city, I looked at the city and it was completely covered in smoke. The gray and black layer of smoke could be easily seen from this distance and from the northwest point of the city. It had started to rain, and one of my colleagues was saying on the phone; the raindrops that hit the gutters bring the sadness of the world with them. He was right; Tehran was a city that spent a night like a day and a day like a night, at least like a rainy sunset, following the explosions, and it was still unclear how many breaths had been lost that night due to these explosions.
In the previous hours, the US and Israel had targeted 3 to 4 oil depots and a refinery in Tehran and an oil depot in Fardis, Karaj, so not only Iran's infrastructure, but also the environment and air of this city were severely threatened by this action.
At around 1 pm on Sunday, the sky was still black in western Tehran, the fire was still raging, but not like in the early hours of the attack.
The strange thing is that despite the obviousness of this pollution, Mehr News Agency published a news on Sunday, quoting Mohammad Sadeq Hassanvand, PhD in Environmental Health Engineering and a member of the Faculty of Health and the Head of the Air Pollution Research Center of Tehran University of Medical Sciences: "Based on data from air quality monitoring stations in Tehran, the air quality index in some areas has reached 165, which is due to an increase in suspended particles less than 2.5 micrometers, and this situation is experienced in Tehran approximately 60 percent of the days of the year."
This is while a lot of smoke is visible in the sky, and not only in western Tehran, but in all parts of Tehran, cars parked on the streets have become black and smoky in an unprecedented way. Most people in the city experience burning eyes, difficulty breathing, and discomfort in the throat, and some feel nauseous, which is due to the smoke of petroleum products in the air.
In one of the alleys leading to the Shahran oil depot, two people are filming the burning tanks. A man is using a dustpan to collect the broken glass from the building and dumping it into a trash can, and the sound of it momentarily distracts the one or two people who are there.
The owner of a shop directly opposite the oil depot also shows me the broken windows of his shop and says that he closed his shop and left an hour before the explosion, but when he heard the explosions, he returned to the scene: “They wouldn’t let us go forward because the fire had spread to part of the street and it was dangerous.” The owner of a supermarket is sweeping the floor of his shop. He doesn’t live in the neighborhood, and when he came in the morning, he saw that the roof of the shop had collapsed and a lot of the goods on the shelves were on the floor. On Shahran Street, however, the situation is much worse. A tanker truck has been completely burned out, and as a passerby standing there said: “It’s no longer a tanker, it’s pure coal.”
Behind it is a completely burned-out Pride. One of the men standing next to the smashed cars shows me with videos on his phone how the entire street floor and the air inside it were on fire: “I was right there when it was bombed and I heard it before it hit. The buildings in front have suffered a lot of damage and on Kohsar Street over there, several cars have burned.”
Another man, who is apparently also a tanker driver, says in surprise; I’m left wondering why they didn’t do it like last time, and at the same time, his colleague’s opinion is that they had emptied the warehouse and now it’s actually the residue of oil products that were there and are burning.
Several people were also injured in the missile attack, and of course, as one of the drivers said, two workers caught fire in the prayer room and died: "Both of them were apparently asleep and fell asleep, the poor things. Of course, the number of deaths at the Fardis oil depot is higher because they were loading at the time of the airstrike." Of course, there is still no definitive and comprehensive statistics on the number of deaths in the airstrikes on the oil depots. Qodratullah Seif, the political deputy of the Alborz governorate, said that 6 people were martyred and 21 people were injured in the attack on the Alborz oil depot, some of whom were ordinary citizens and residents of the depot.