After Signs of Life Detected

Search Resumes for Possible Beirut Blast Survivor

Date: 04 September 2020 - 22:19

News ID: ۸۲۳۹۷

BEIRUT (Dispatches) – Emergency crews sifted through rubble Friday for a possible survivor in Beirut after the detection of a pulse drew crowds hopeful of a miracle one month on from a devastating explosion.
"We have excavated rubble but we haven’t reached a conclusion yet,” said George Abou Moussa of Lebanon’s civil defense.
A specialist sensor device on Thursday had detected a pulse beneath a leveled building, raising hopes that a survivor could be found more than four weeks after the disaster that killed at least 191 people.
The authorities blamed the explosion on the unsafe storage of more than 2,500 tonnes of highly explosive ammonium nitrate in a port warehouse.
Chilean rescue workers and Lebanese civil defense teams on Friday morning removed chunks of rubble with their hands, resuming an operation they had briefly paused overnight, an AFP photographer said.
The pulse they detected on Friday had already slowed significantly compared to a previous recording, said Nicholas Saade, who coordinates between Chilean rescue teams and their Lebanese counterparts.
"After removing the big chunks we scanned again for heartbeats or respiration (and) it showed low beat/respiration” levels of seven per minute, he told AFP.
"The reading before was about 16 to 18,” he added.
Using their hands and shovels, the rescuers moved in the "direction of the signal”, trying to find a tunnel or entry point that would give them access to a "survivor or corpse”, Saade said, without elaborating on how long the entire process could take.
The Lebanese army found 4.35 tonnes of ammonium nitrate near the entrance to Beirut’s port weeks after huge explosion of the same chemical.
According to the army’s statement, quoted by the agency, army engineers were dealing with the chemical. The statement said the chemicals were found outside entrance nine to the port.
Lebanon’s government quit amid public anger in a nation already brought to its knees by an economic crisis. The public remains anxious that more hazardous materials are being stored badly, putting them at risk.
Earlier on Thursday, President Michel Aoun ordered repairs to be made to old refueling infrastructure at Beirut airport and called for an investigation into a report that thousands of liters of fuel had leaked from the system.
Beirut airport head Fadi el-Hassan told a news conference that a leak of 84,000 liters of fuel had occurred in March 2019 and repairs were completed in two months. He said international investigators had described the repairs as "satisfactory”.