Rescue teams search the rubble of buildings damaged after the explosion in Beirut. (Reuters)
Beirut:
Rescue teams on Friday resumed their search for possible survivors under the rubble in Beirut, buoyed by feeble hopes for a miracle a month after a monstrous explosion ripped through the city’s port.
The cataclysmic explosion on August 4 killed a total of 191 people, making it the deadliest peace disaster in Lebanon. A month later, seven people are still listed as missing.
Hopes arose Thursday that one of them could still be found alive after a specialized sensing device detected a heartbeat under the rubble of a collapsed building.
Teams of rescuers from Chile and Lebanon used their hands on Friday to lift chunks of debris from the site between the worst affected districts of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhail.
They resumed their efforts after a brief hiatus overnight, an AFP photographer at the scene said.
“We have excavated rubble, but we have not yet reached a conclusion,” said George Abou Moussa of Lebanon’s civil defense.
The pulse they detected on Friday had already slowed significantly compared to an earlier recording, said Nicholas Saade, who coordinates between the Chilean and Lebanese rescuers.
“After removing the large chunks that we rescanned for heartbeat or respiration, it showed low heartbeat / respiration levels” of seven per minute, he told AFP.
“The previous reading was 16-18,” he added.
Chilean “heroes”
The area excavated by rescuers was one of the hardest hit by the blast, which was so powerful it was heard in Cyprus, some 150 miles (240 kilometers) away.
The blast devastated swaths of Beirut and accumulated fresh misery for Lebanese already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s worst economic crisis in decades.
A sniffer dog deployed by Chilean rescuers Wednesday night responded to an odor from the site of a collapsed building in Gemmayzeh, Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud said.
After detecting a pulse on Thursday, Lebanese emergency workers joined the Chileans to determine if there were survivors.
News of the search drew crowds of people hoping they could save another life.
Using their hands and shovels, they moved in the “direction of the signal” Friday, trying to find a tunnel or entry point that would give them access to a “survivor or corpse,” Saade said, without detailing how long the could last. process. drink.
Lebanon, already mired in an economic crisis before the port explosion, is not equipped for disaster management.
The country lacks the tools and experience to handle advanced search and rescue operations that now have the support of experts from Chile, France and the United States.
The Chileans recently arrived with a sniffer dog trained to find humans, as well as specialized sensing devices that can detect heartbeats and breathing.
They have been praised as heroes by many Lebanese on social media who have compared their experience to the lackluster performance of what they see as an absent state.
Cry for “heartless officials”
The Lebanese authorities came under further criticism from an anxious public after Thursday’s search and rescue operation was halted for two hours.
In a statement on Friday, the Lebanese army said search and rescue efforts had been halted because pieces of the building’s wall could fall on emergency workers.
Rescue teams resumed work at 10.30pm GMT after military engineers with the help of two cranes “managed to secure the building to resume work,” according to the statement.
The strike sparked protests on social media.
“There is a beating heart in Mar Mikhail, and there are heartless officials who decided to stop the rescue operation,” activist Zahia Awad said on Twitter.
In addition to the deaths of more than 190 people, the explosion on August 4 injured at least 6,500 and left 300,000 homeless.
Hassan Diab, who resigned with his government in the wake of the explosion, said 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate had exploded. The fertilizer had been stored in a port tank for years, without precautionary measures.
But experts believe that the amount that was lit was substantially less than that declared by the authorities.
Western powers, including France and the United States, have joined the requests of Lebanese citizens at home and abroad for an international investigation.
The Lebanese authorities, however, have rejected foreign participation in the investigation, favoring instead a local investigation, albeit supported by the US FBI.
France has launched its own investigation.
The 25 suspects identified by Lebanese investigators are now in custody, a judicial source told AFP.
Among them are Beirut Port Chief Hassan Koraytem and Customs Chief Badri Daher, as well as three Syrian welders.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
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