Spent the morning clearing debris out of my flat, with help from some wonderful people. Few random thoughts. Said this before but the scale of the cleanup effort—all of it being organized independently—really is amazing. Volunteers everywhere with brooms, shovels, food, water.

When I ran down to a manoucheh place that survived, the guys standing outside were marveling at how often they had to turn away volunteers. "My house is already clean," one of them said. "But every time I come down to the street, another group of kids asks if they can help."

But the scale of the task ahead is setting in, too: cleanup is almost the easy part. One of the guys helping me stopped for a cigarette and broke down a bit while looking out my window, which looks onto the port. "It's all gone. It's going to take ten years to rebuild."

And I wonder what that means for the politics, for the efforts to demand change. There is rage here, rage on a level I've never seen. But a lot of people affected by the blast are also going to be in survival mode—on top of those who already were because of the economic crisis.