BEIRUT – Rescue workers broke into a building in the building early Friday, hoping to meet survivors under debris after receiving a pulsing signal last month.
Lebanon was shut down a month after the blast, which killed and injured thousands and shocked the country. A moment of silence was observed at Silence.:0 on, the moment marking the most devastating single event in Lebanon’s history on ban gust on.
A sniffer dog belonging to the Chilean search and rescue team launched a search operation on Thursday afternoon after the team was passing through the neighborhood of Jemmaizah and rushed towards the debris.
Some protesters claimed that the Lebanese army had asked the Chilean team to stop the search before work stopped shortly after sunset after several hours of searching. Members of Lebanon’s civil defense team arrived an hour after midnight and began searching for protesters until work began.
The army said in a statement on Friday that the Chilean team had stopped work half an hour before midnight, fearing they would be put in danger. It added that military experts inspected the site and two cranes were brought in to remove the wall and the search was resumed.
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On Friday morning, rescue workers were slowly digging holes in their hands and houses to remove debris. The more they excavated, the more care will be taken to protect any potential survivors under the debris.
On Thursday, the team used audio dio detection devices for signals or beats and found out what a pulse of 18 to 19 beats per minute might be. The origin of the pulsing signal was not immediately known, but it launched an insidious search and raised new hopes.
On Friday morning, the beat went up to seven per minute, according to reporters at the site.
Still, it was highly unlikely that any survivors would be found a month after any gust blast, with nearly 10,000,000 tons of ammonium nitrate burned on the survivors. The blast killed 191 people and injured 6,000 others and is considered one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded. Thousands of homes were damaged.
“There is nothing but Nin percent, but we should keep watching even if there is less than 1 percent hope,” civil defense activist Yusuf Malah said on Thursday. He said the task was extremely sensitive.
A Chilean volunteer, however, said his devices detected human breath and heartbeat, not animal, and he received a human signal. The worker, who identified himself as Francesco Lermonda, said it was rare for anyone to survive a month under debris, but had not heard of it.
Two days after the blast, a French rescue team and Lebanese civil defense volunteers spotted the wreckage of the same building where the ground floor was a bar. At the time, they had no reason to believe there were any corpses or survivors at the scene.
In another chilling reminder of the horrific explosion a month ago, the Lebanese army said it had discovered more than 4 tonnes of ammonium nitrate near the port of Beirut on Thursday.
According to the military, military experts were called in for inspection and 4.3535 tonnes of hazardous chemicals were found in four containers stored near the port. There were no details about the origin of the chemicals or its owner.
