Beirut port blast haunts scarred survivors
BEIRUT: The Aug.4 blast that thundered through the city levelled entire neighbourhoods, killed more than 200 people, wounded 6,500 others and pummelled the lives of survivors.
This dark blotch in Lebanon’s chaotic history has since folded into a nightmarish year amid a stalled blast probe and an accelerating financial crisis branded by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern times.
With no politicians held to account and the country facing soaring poverty, a plummeting currency, angry protests and shortages of basic items from medicine to fuel, many survivors are simmering in the lead-up to the tragedy’s first anniversary.
A year ater the cataclysmic Beirut port blast, Shady Rizk’s doctors are still plucking glass from his body.
The latest extraction was a centimetre-long sliver above his knee pit.
“Almost every month, I find a new piece... the glass is still stuck in my thighs, my legs, and I guess, in my arms,” said Rizk, a 36-year-old network engineer who was sprayed with shards during the explosion.
“The doctors said there will continue to be glass in my body for several years,” he said.
“The explosion still lives inside of me,” Rizk said, speaking from under the office building where he was when the blast went off.
“With August 4 approaching, knowing that nobody has been caught or sent to prison, the anger is hiting hard,” he added.
“It makes you want to break things, take to the streets in protest, throw Molotov cocktails, spark a fire... anything to let the anger out.”
Rizk was standing on a balcony overlooking the port, filming plumes of smoke rising from a warehouse, when the hundreds of tonnes of ammonium nitrate fertiliser stocked inside it exploded in front of him.
The blast let him with more than 350 stitches and permanently impaired his vision. He can barely see at night now, making his world even darker in a country blighted by endless cuts.
But physical scars are a secondary problem, he said. “The trauma, it rips you up inside,” said Rizk, who is now planning to emigrate to Canada. “It’s like internal crying.”
Siting in his clinic nearby, Rony Mecataf said he is adjusting to the permanent loss of vision in his right eye ater three surgeries and several meetings with specialists in Europe over the past 12 months.