(Reuters) – Imagine throwing a giant explosion on the floor, removing a falling closet in your house, cutting your forehead by flying glass – and then brushing the blood and it to film news.
TV producer Yara Abi Nader is pictured with her face covered in blood, in a selfie after an explosion in the port area of Beirut, Lebanon 4 August 2020. Picture taken 4 August 2020. REUTERS / Yara Abi Nader
Reuters senior television producer Ayat Basma provided the world with some of the first images of the damage caused when 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, stored in the port of Beirut, caused antiquity and an explosion that would end up killing on his destroy at least 150 people and a swathe of the city.
“I was lying on the ground, and all I heard was the sirens of the car alarms,” said Basma, who had taken a day off work on Tuesday. “I thought I did not want to die.”
“Then the adrenaline rushed in.”
Bleeding from a hole in her head, with wet hair and hurriedly dressed, Basma rushed into the street and began filming with the only camera she had on hand – her smartphone.
Around them clattered and threatened residents over glass and pun. Some people carried injured relatives and threw drivers into nearby cars to take them to the hospital.
In the building next to itself, the roof had burned down. Those who looked up described a fireball in the distance that turned the sky into an orange and white mushroom cloud.
“Everything was down, the neighbors were screaming, the children were crying,” Basma said. “All you could hear was the sound of cars driving on broken glass.”
But I just said to myself, ‘Film and send. Film and send. ”
As journalists, we usually document and observe through a lens or behind a notebook. But this week, our colleagues in the Reuters Beirut bureau, our regional headquarters, were catapulted into the news, even as they rushed to cover it. Several spent hours on the streets while their families were injured at home and in shock.
Television producer Yara Abi Nader was driving when the explosion occurred. She had rolled her car window down to get some evening air, which helped her avoid contaminated glass in her face. A shard of snow fell on her forehead, but she also immediately shot video on her phone to send to colleagues.
“I was focused on only one thing: taking my images,” said Abi Nader. “It was a form of denial – I didn’t really want to look at my face.”
Photographer Mohamed Azakir thought it was an earthquake when he first felt the ground shake. When he reached the harbor area, there were bodies everywhere. He saw a man from the torso pinned down under a car, covered with dirt and blood. Azakir thought the man was dead, but he opened his eyes and widened his arms as the photographer approached.
Azakir called some rescuers and helped them move the car to free the man. See his photos over here
RAZED TO THE GROUND
Even before Tuesday’s explosion, Beirut’s once elegant and beautiful city center had already been destroyed by months of protests, and a crippling economic downturn. The explosion yielded the final blow, hitting shop windows long barricaded and lost.
Reuters downtown offices were also destroyed. Senior correspondent Ellen Francis hid under her desk when pieces of the ceiling on the floor crashed and window glass shattered into computers.
Francis picked up her phone to tell colleagues to send a news message, like a ‘snap’ in Reuters lingo. “I tried to send the message ‘Big Explosion’ and ‘Please Snap’, but the letters came out because I was shaking so hard.”
“Are you OK?” shouted bureau chief Tom Perry, who had also sought refuge under the bureau. He also tried to warn editors, calling his wife and son. “We have to get out of here.”
Outside the office, Perry and Francis noticed a woman running after her with open arms and blood streaming down her face. It was Abi Nader who tried to get to the office.
“There’s no office,” Francis said, as Perry led them to his apartment, where they worked all night in the middle of rubble and basking in walls.
Reuters Middle East editor Samia Nakhoul has covered the Lebanese civil war, the invasion of Iraq, in which she was badly wounded, and the Arab Spring. When the explosion struck, she was sitting with her two teenage children in the car.
With instincts of years of reporting on overtaking, Nakhoul told her children to dive and then leave the car and ran for cover. ‘As long as I live I will never forget the trauma and horror in my children’s eyes and the fear that angered me not to harm them. This tragedy brought back memories that I have spent my life forgetting. ”
Nakhoul and her children ran home. She turned on her laptop.
Reuters coverage of the day of the explosion
Graph: Beirut plays after deadly explosion
Wider image: Capturing a Beirut rescue
Additional Reporting by Yann Tessier and Rosalba O’Brien; Edited by Tiffany Wu
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