I stumbled around the rest of the office. A window had fallen off the wall. The studio was a worm of equipment, cables were scattered everywhere, but the tripod with its camera was still in place on the floor.
The glass entrance of the office, with its large, red CNN logo, lay shattered in the hallway.
A few minutes later, a doorman named Mustafa, a long, normally well-muscled hood, came running in. “Are you okay?” he cried. “Is everyone okay?”
“I’m fine,” I replied. Nothing had happened to me.
“Thank God,” he said, and kept walking down the aisle to look for others. The building had long been quiet since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
When I investigated the damage, I started calling friends and colleagues. Three minutes after the explosion, I came across CNN producer Ghazi Balkiz. “I’m fine,” he said, and the line went dead. I mentioned our cameraman, Richard Harlow. His phone was dead. I cried again, and again.
Lebanon, a country where I have lived for the last three years but have been in and out for years, and where I attended boarding school when the Civil War broke out in April 1975, is a place where dramatic events sometimes happen, it seems, out of the blue. And on this hot and humid Tuesday, it seemed like just another August evening until hell suddenly shook the calm.
It didn’t take long before I was overwhelmed with requests to explain what was happening to CNN viewers, but without a cameraman I had to report on what I had seen and learned over the phone. Richard, the cameraman, has not yet answered the phone. Fear gripped me that he, like so many others on this day, had been injured, or worse.
Eventually a colleague joined him. The blast had thrown Richard off his scooter, I was told, and he had injured his hand. “Prepare the medical kit,” my colleague instructed me.
He appeared in the office with a deep hole in his hand. I sprayed the wound with disinfectant powder, picked it up and told him to go to a hospital while I continued on the phone. But he refused to set up the camera. Within minutes we had a live image of the office.
All the while, the information that arrived became grimmer and grimmer. First 10 dead, then dozens more. Hundreds, then thousands wounded.
“I lived through the Civil War, I lived through the (1982) Israeli invasion, the 2006 (Lebanon-Israel) war,” a friend told me over the phone, “but never, never have I seen an explosion like this,” he said. se.
It was the refrain I heard from one to the other.
“We live a curse,” another friend told me.
But this evening, all this misery vanished into the background as Beirut residents frantically shouted to find missing relatives, rushed to hospitals to donate blood, investigated the latest damage to their abused lives, and wondered why the fate befell them. had blown her yet again to another cruel subject.
.
