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The life expectancy of finding a survivor in the ruins of a sinister building in Beirut, a month after the devastating explosion in the port, it vanished.
A team of Chilean first responders, belonging to the Topos Chile unit, which assists in rescue tasks in the Lebanese capital, detected weak heartbeats under the rubble of a building on Thursday thanks to a sniffer dog and thermal scanners. This news raised hopes of finding a survivor of the tragic explosion in the capital’s port, which destroyed entire neighborhoods on 4 August and left at least 191 dead and more than 6,500 injured.
After three days removing a large amount of debris, mostly by hand, Francesco Lermanda, a specialized Chilean lifeguard, indicated on Saturday night that no other signs of life had been detected among the ruins of the building.
“Unfortunately, today we can say that technically we have no sign of life inside the building,” he told reporters.
In context:
Two first responders entered a tunnel on Saturday to the last redoubt in which victims could have been found, but did not find anyone, he said.
“Notwithstanding that, cooperation and protocols continue to be able to leave the safe zone and continue looking for a victim inside,” explained Lermanda.
In the afternoon, the engineer overseeing the operations, Riyadh al-Asad, commented that several layers of rubble had been removed, to no avail.
“We got to the stairwell and there was nothing,” he lamented. “The dog gave us hope, but that also revealed the failures of the entire system. This building should have been cleared several weeks ago,” he said.
Lebanon does not have the equipment or personnel capable of carrying out such search and rescue operations. Therefore, experts from Chile, France and the United States arrived at the scene.
There was still debris to be removed on the ladder, but the operation seemed to have been complicated.
Lebanese Civil Defense Operations Director George Abou Moussa said on Saturday morning that the chances of finding survivors were “low”.
For his part, one of the Chilean rescuers, Walter Muñoz, told reporters that the hope of finding a survivor is “2%.”
Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud told reporters on Thursday that there could be one or two bodies and even a survivor.
This announcement, a month after the apocalyptic explosion caused by several tons of ammonium nitrate stored for years in the port without security measures, raised hope among much of the traumatized public opinion.
“It’s our last heartbeat,” Nasri Sayegh, a visual artist and actor from Beiruti, wrote on Facebook on Friday.
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