‘They didn’t stand a chance’: Beirut in mourning as families desperately search for loved ones in the rubble

Lives torn apart as bewildered residents look for family, friends, and belongings amid the debris and destruction

Time is running out. Every hour the bulldozer spends clawing at the patchwork quilt of rubble, the rescuers know the chances of finding anyone alive shrinks.

Hope ran high at daybreak when exhausted volunteers in central Beirut pulled out two women from the snarl of debris alive.

By noon they had dug a 30ft hole in the mound that was once a bougainvillea-bedecked old Lebanese villa off Beirut’s popular bar street.

But they had still not found the remaining brothers Abdu, 35, and Shadi, 40.

The outlook was not looking good, one rescuer from south Lebanon admits, shaking his head at the hole.

“The building was so old, they didn’t stand a chance,” says Lina, whose husband was a cousin of the two missing men.

“We had hoped they were in the hospitals but deep down we know they are in there,” she adds with desperation.

Across Beirut, bewildered residents looked for loved ones, friends, and belongings as they picked their way through the mangled remains of their homes evaporated in Tuesday’s blast, which killed at least 135 people and injured a further 5,000 more.

At least another hundred are believed to be still unaccounted for.

At the city’s port, the epicentre of the massive explosion, relatives gathered at the cordon to seek information on those still missing, among whom were port and custom employees like Ghassan Hasrouty.


 Lebanese soldiers search for survivors after Tuesday’s massive explosion 
 (AP)

His daughter Tatiana believed her father and his colleagues were still trapped beneath the rubble and took to Twitter to beg for help.

Others posted on Instagram photos of the vanished trying to cross-reference them with names of those in wards across the country.

Some had been found. So many have not.

Lebanese authorities blamed the extraordinary explosion on 2,750 tonnes of highly explosive material stored for years in unsafe conditions at the port. The blast registered as far away as Cyprus, was compared to an atomic bomb, and named the most powerful blast ever to rip through the capital city.

A grey and red mushroom plume towered over the skyline as the shockwaves ravaged everything in its path including building facades, windows, vehicles and people.

The damage was so severe Beirut’s governor Marwan Aboud said as many as 300,000 people may have been left homeless.

The area most reduced to rubble comprised the streets near the port that once housed the busy hubs of restaurants, bars and shops that helped Beirut win its nickname of the Paris of the Middle East.

The worst hit were homes of those facing the port – like Rayan Makhlouf’s 83-year-old grandmother, who was sitting at home alone that night when the blast ripped off the front of the building.

The newly engaged 24-year-old had hoped his grandmother might still be alive, because her phone was busy when he called. He later discovered it was just the line jamming with hundreds of worried calls.

He was one of the many scouring hospitals until he found out.

“She didn’t have the time to tell us there was an explosion,” he says, as he retrieves his family belongings from the now skeletal building.

“Around 100 are still missing, some are in the hospital, some are buried in their buildings,” he adds.

He, like all the people who spoke to The Independent, blame the incompetence and corruption of the government for the disaster, saying the country desperately needs a change of leadership.

Several port officials were put under house arrest over the explosion, after public records and documents published online showed senior Lebanese officials knew for more than six years that explosives were being improperly stored at the port and the danger it posed.

“We blame the politicians for this incident. In one boom we lost everything,” says Mariam, 35, a mother of three, sweeping the shattered remains of her family store into the gutter.

“They want to rob Lebanon and so they did. Until there was literally nothing left.”