[ad_1]
‘Everything was falling’
One hundred days since the explosion in the heart of Beirut, the memories do not fade. “Sometimes I feel like the ground is shaking, exactly as it was before the explosion,” says Tilda Wakim, owner of a home goods showroom on the edge of the city’s harbor. “I don’t just remember it. I feel it shaking. “
The flashbacks aren’t her only record of what she and her family endured on the night of August 4.
The detonation of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate housed in the port of Beirut over more than seven years was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever recorded, and the first of its scale in the era of smartphones.
As soon as a fire broke out in the port shortly before 6 p.m. that day, people in Beirut began filming, taking pictures, and recording messages. What they captured forms an extraordinary record of the disaster in the city as experienced by its residents. The Guardian, in collaboration with the Arabic podcasting network Sowt, has compiled some of their accounts and featured them in the timeline below.
‘We thought it was just another murder’
Fouad Wakim, Tilda’s son, was working in the family’s showroom when he received video of the fire at a nearby warehouse. At 6.07pm, about half a minute before the main blast, he heard a dull bang. “It sounded like the explosions we used to hear when politicians were assassinated,” he says. “We thought it was just another murder.”
At his apartment in Gemmayze, a suburb a few hundred meters from the port, Jean-Paul Rahal was watching a political talk show with his mother when the host brought up reports of the fire. “My mom told me, ‘JP, pack your bags. We have to go, something is happening, ‘”he recalled.
She filled a bag and he took her passport. Before leaving, Jean-Paul noticed that the balcony door was still open and went to close it.
In the basement of the home goods showroom, Tilda also heard the first explosion. The ground below them rumbled. “Did you hear what?” asked a colleague.
He had just enough time to say yes, he says. “And then everything was falling.”
Note: No one was killed or seriously injured in the following videos.
The chaotic first hours
The explosion covered the city in dust and debris. For the next few hours, depicted on our timeline, Tilda and others fought to save themselves and others, and to piece together what had happened.
Where was Omar?
It had been difficult to miss the huge fire that was rising from the port of Beirut at 6pm that day. Omar had seen it from the window of his house. When he heard the first smaller explosion, he was quick to start filming the scene outside. It was five seconds before the explosion.
Days later, a cleanup volunteer found Omar’s destroyed phone in the rubble outside the family’s home. It was repaired and returned to the family. They opened with the last video saved.
What happened after
The force of the blast had lifted Omar and crossed the room. He had remained conscious but was badly injured and could barely see. Wrinkled in the rubble, Omar had thought of his girlfriend, who lived across the street; he had mustered his strength to get up and reach for her, feeling his way out of the house with his hands.
The brothers’ friends had overheard Fouad’s messages and were struggling to help find Omar. The first to reach the devastated site saw a familiar figure outside the house. Omar had gone down four flights of stairs, found a pair of slippers somewhere, and managed to walk a few feet from the house.
The handprints Omar left on the wall when he managed to get off the floor.
“Our friend found my brother sitting on the street,” Fouad said. “He threw it in the back of the truck and called me to ask me where to take it, because the hospitals were completely full.”
The family was lucky. The father of Fouad’s fiancee was a gynecologist with a clinic in the mountains. The doctor called his nursing staff and told them to start preparing for Omar’s arrival.
In the back of the truck, Omar was barely conscious for the trip. But he could still get some details, says Tilda. (Omar was still on the mend and couldn’t be interviewed for this story.) “They told him in the car, your father asks for you,” says Tilda. “Automatically, Omar said, my mother is hurt. Because if not, why would they say ‘your father’ and not ‘your parents’? “
On the other side of Beirut, people had answered the call of the blast and were milling around the port area trying to help. One was a young man on a scooter from the western neighborhood of Verdun, who found Jean-Paul outside the second hospital overwhelmed from which he had been turned away that night, in real fear now that he might bleed to death on the streets. He took him to another, larger medical center.
Another was a doctor from Makassed Hospital in central Beirut, who had heard the blast while driving from his shift and headed straight for the sound. She picked up Jean-Paul’s mother, who led her to Jean-Paul in a crowded waiting room at the third hospital. “There were so many injured elderly people, in every meter of the hospital there was someone sitting on the ground, all bleeding,” he says.
Jean-Paul was transferred to a different hospital where he received urgent treatment.
The doctor saw that Jean-Paul needed urgent treatment and took him to his own hospital. There, more than two hours after the blast, the cuts were finally stapled to his forehead, ear and wrist.
At approximately 9:30 pm, Tilda arrived at the Mt Lebanon hospital, where her son Omar was receiving 160 stitches, including a deep wound to his forehead. “When I saw it, I passed out,” Tilda said. “People had told me it was okay, but when I saw it, I saw that they were lying to me.”
She finally allowed the doctors to treat what they told her was a serious head injury: 55. “That’s when I felt like I finally woke up,” she said, pausing for a moment. “How to wake up from hell”.
A passerby gave Mousa shoes outside his hotel, and another person picked him up and took him to a hospital, where he was treated for cuts on his feet and told to rest. He still had no idea what had happened in Beirut until he went on social media that night and saw videos of the explosion at the port.
He returned to his hotel room the next day to collect his belongings. He was in awe of the state of the room from which he had fled unscathed. “What I think about the most is that he could have died at that moment, with any piece of glass in his neck or in his eyes or wherever,” he says. “I lived at a time when others died.”
Mousa photographed the ruins of a street near Café Em Nazi when she returned the next day.
Three months later
The death toll from the blast exceeded 200, and some of the more than 6,500 injured died from their injuries in the months that followed. A preliminary estimate from the University of Sheffield says the explosion was one-twentieth the size of that unleashed by the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Neither Tilda and her family, nor Jean-Paul or anyone else featured in this story have received compensation from a £ 100 billion Lebanese-pound reconstruction package presented by the government. The fund is worth about $ 13 million at market rate, far less than what is required to repair the roughly 80,000 damaged homes and buildings.
The Wakim family in the showroom, October 2020. Photo: Daniel S Carde for The Guardian
No one has been charged with ammonium nitrate, which subsequent research has shown was repeatedly flagged as a threat, even in the weeks leading up to the explosion.
Jean-Paul and his mother have made a full recovery and their house has been repaired.
The Wakim family showroom is slowly being rebuilt with the help of Miele, the German company whose products they store. With one difference: the glass facades of the old showroom will be replaced by metal sheets. “We have been told that the situation is not improving, so we must protect what is left of the showroom,” says Tilda.
The Rahals, October 2020. Photo: Daniel S Carde for The Guardian
She says the Lebanese are used to rebuilding, but this time it feels different. “We no longer have that feeling of being safe at home,” he says. “Death feels like it is under your feet, it is very close to you.”
Mousa has left for Istanbul and is not sure if he will return to Beirut permanently. Maya says she was sure he would finally leave after the explosion, but not anymore. “Whenever I listen to the music of [the Lebanese singer] Fairouz, his song for Beirut, ”he says. “I don’t think so, I can’t leave my house, my memories, my childhood. There is no way “.
