Survivors talk of life beyond repair as families begin to collect the dead
Rescue teams finding few alive in the rubble as shaken citizens attempt to rally and begin clean-up
A‘We went down but they wouldn’t let us in. So we divided into six cars and started going to all of the hospitals to see if he was there’
s the sun rose over Beirut yesterday morning, the full apocalyptic extent of the damage was finally revealed. The area surrounding the Lebanese capital’s port district looked as though it had been the stage for weeks of brutal fighting.
The smoke had passed and the wounded had been moved off the streets but the pavements were spattered with blood and thick with shattered glass.
Outside one hospital, a small crowd of people gathered after a gruelling night. They all had the same lost look as they stared at the still-bloodstained floor, struggling to comprehend what had happened the night before. They were all waiting for the same thing: to pick up the bodies of dead relatives and friends.
Sitting in a line on a wall, five young men, all aged 23, began to sob and hug each other. They had lost their friend Yusef, a port worker.
After a night of searching, they had finally found him, and would have to take his body home to his parents.
“The last time we heard from him, he had texted us all a video he had taken of the first explosion at the port,” his friend, also named Yusef, told The Daily Telegraph.
The second explosion happened barely 10 minutes later, sending shock waves for miles across the capital, prompting a group of his friends to race to the port.
“We went down but they wouldn’t let us in. So we divided into six cars and started going to all of the hospitals to see if he was there.”
The undertakers stepped over a puddle of blood that was still soaking into the floor from the previous night, giving a subtle nod to Yusef ’s friends to follow him to the car as they carried his coffin.
“We became friends in kindergarten and went all the way through to our graduation, which was supposed to have been this semester,” one friend said, unable to hold back his tears.
Tuesday night’s explosion brought about the physical collapse of a city that for the past several months has been falling apart in every other aspect. In sweltering 30C heat, members of the civil defence began digging through the rubble early in the morning.
Among the few buildings that had completely collapsed, after hours of digging, only limp and lifeless bodies, for the most part, were pulled from their homes.
Speaking to The Telegraph 24 hours after the blast, one civil defence worker said they were only finding corpses – there were no survivors.
But then one man was pulled out of the rubble alive after spending 15 hours buried. The volunteer forces erupted into joy, jumping to take selfies with the man.
With the death toll last night standing at 135 and more than 5,000 injured, the shock of how close thousands of people had come to losing their lives is palpable. It is impossible to avoid the scale of the tragedy. Every few seconds, ambulance sirens heighten the uneasy atmosphere across the city.
Packing what is left of their homes into cars that no longer have windows and are bent out of shape by the force of the blast, those who can afford to are escaping to mountain villages. For many families who have lived in this city that has been shaken by tragedy over the decades, this is not the first time they have had to flee.
Feeling that the state will not step in to help the rescue effort, the Lebanese took to the streets of Gemmayzeh, one of the worst-hit and most well-off areas, to try to clean it up. Harking back to the days of the protests late last year, tents were set up to hand out shovels, brushes, bin bags and gloves.
As the people rallied and tried to dust themselves off, Beirut formally entered a state of emergency.
The city has seen a civil war, assassinations, occupations, economic collapse and a pandemic – but nothing appears to have shaken the spirit of its people as much as this explosion.
“Lebanon had already taken away almost everything I had built,” said a mechanic in the port area. “Then yesterday, the remnants were blown away. Now I have nothing and no way to rebuild my life.”