• General Safety

  Search is on for survivors after blast kills more than 100 in Beirut Lebanon

  Posted by Nigel Brown on 5 August 2020 at 10:12 am

  Rescue workers still struggling to treat thousands of people wounded in an enormous explosion that rocked Beirut turned their attention on Wednesday morning to the desperate search for survivors.

  The blast, so powerful it could be felt more than 150 miles away in Cyprus, leveled whole sections of the city near the port of Beirut, leaving nothing but twisted metal and debris for blocks in Beirut’s downtown business district.

  The waterfront neighborhood normally full of restaurants and nightclubs was essentially flattened. A number of crowded residential neighborhoods in the city’s eastern and predominantly Christian half were also ravaged.

  Nearly all the windows along one popular commercial strip had been blown out and the street was littered with glass, rubble and cars that had slammed into each other after the blast. The buildings that remained standing in the blast area looked as if they had been skinned, leaving only hulking skeletons.

  The death toll rose to over 100 and with an untold number still missing and officials expected that figure to rise. More than 4,000 people were injured, overwhelming the city’s hospitals.

  With electricity out in most of the city, emergency workers were limited in what they could do until the sun rose.

  Emergency workers joined residents scattered across the wreckage digging through the rubble even fires still smoldered around them.

  “There are many people missing until now. People are asking the emergency department about their loved ones and it is difficult to search at night because there is no electricity,” health minister Hamad Hasan told Reuters.

  “We need everything to hospitalize the victims, and there is an acute shortage of everything,” Mr. Hassan told local news stations on Wednesday morning.

  Officials said it appeared the blast was caused by the detonation of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical commonly used in fertilizer and bombs, which had been stored in a warehouse at the port since it was confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014.

  At least four large hospitals in Beirut were so severely damaged by the explosion that they were unable to admit patients, doctors said. Health care workers were injured and killed in the blast, and a warehouse storing much of the country’s vaccine supply was believed to have been razed.

  The vaccines and medications stored at the warehouse are used to prevent infectious diseases in children under 5 years old and to treat acute sicknesses as well as cancer and autoimmune diseases.

  

  Nigel Brown replied 4 years, 2 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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