Chaos reigns at overwhelmed hospitals

beirut — His head bandaged just like his patients, Dr Antoine Qurban said on Tuesday’s enormous blast brought “Armageddon” to Beirut’s overwhelmed hospitals in chaotic scenes reminiscent of a war zone.

“Wounded people bleeding out in the middle of the street, others lying on the ground in the hospital courtyard — it reminded me of my missions with Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Afghanistan many years ago,” he said of his volunteer stint with the medical charity.

“It was Armageddon,” Qurban, who is in his late sixties, said outside the Hotel Dieu Hospital in central Beirut.

The facility is normally his place of work, but on Wednesday he was among throngs of patients, following up on a gash he suffered Tuesday night.

Qurban was at a nearby coffee shop when the blast hit around 6pm local time, flinging him some 20 metres across the room.

His own hospital was overflowing within minutes with wounded, so a stranger on a motorcycle zipped him to another facility.

After an hours-long wait, a medic stitched up his head wound in the street.

The scenes were no less chaotic on Wednesday, as people wounded overnight by falling shards of glass sought treatment, weaving between smashed equipment and piles of debris in Hotel Dieu’s hallways.

Mothers asked desperately about the fates of their wounded sons. An elderly man begged for news of his wife, who had been transferred from another hospital.

A cacophony of cellphones rang, and fragments of exhausted conversations could be heard, usually retelling survival stories.

“A miracle kept him alive,” one woman was heard saying, while a man with a bandaged leg handed a blinking cellphone to his sister, telling her simply that “I can’t talk anymore”.

Hotel Dieu treated at least 300 wounded on Tuesday and registered 13 dead, according to its medical director Dr George Dabar, who was a medical student there during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

“Even then, I didn’t see anything like what I saw yesterday,” he said.

His voice cracking with emotion, Dabar said the hardest moment was telling families their loved ones had died, with nothing left to be done.

“It’s so hard to tell a father carrying his young daughter and trying to save her that she’s already dead.”

According to Lebanon’s health ministry, two hospitals were rendered completely out of service and two more were partly unusable. —