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No wonder in Beirut: after three days of hope and fear, rescue teams have given up hope of finding another survivor of the disaster. Under the rubble of a collapsed house “from a technical point of view” there are no more signs of life, the head of the Chilean rescue team “Topos” (“Topos”), Francisco Lermanda, told reporters Saturday night in the Lebanese capital. Rescue teams climbed into the building through a tunnel. It could be ruled out that someone was there.
The frantic search for someone buried began on Thursday, almost a month after the devastating explosion at the port. Chilean rescuers discovered signs of a survivor with tracking devices and his search dog “Flash.” Among other things, they were able to distinguish faint breathing signals several times under the rubble.
Beirut held her breath in hopes of a miracle. Little by little, the emergency services cleared the debris, mainly with shovels and hands. Because the building threatened to collapse, they advanced slowly. “We cannot use heavy equipment because we fear a total collapse,” Lebanese civil defense chief George Abu Musa told the LBCI.
The discovered breathing was by our own rescue team.
However, hope gradually faded as rescuers were unable to find further evidence of a survivor. At night, two members of the Chilean team climbed through a tunnel inside the building without discovering anything.
The tracking devices are extremely sensitive and can detect minimal breathing, Lermanda said. The exhalation was discovered the day before. However, it later turned out that it came from the rescue team. A dead person could still be found under the rubble, but 95 percent of the building had been searched.
The once three-story building with a bar on the ground floor is only a few hundred meters from the blast site. In the loud detonation, the upper floors almost completely collapsed.
Beirut apocalypse
At least 190 people died and more than 6,000 were injured in the August 4 disaster. The port and much of the surrounding residential areas were massively destroyed. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Health, seven people were missing until recently.
In recent days, many Lebanese have celebrated the Chilean rescuers and their search dog as heroes and, at the same time, have criticized their own government for not having searched the site earlier. The debris had to be removed immediately after the blast because the building was badly damaged, said the engineer Assad involved. “The strange thing about all this is that we needed a dog to clean up the rubble. We did not do anything. The dog made fun of the whole system. “(SDA)