Rescue resumes after life detected in rubble a month after Beirut blast
By Liz Sly, Siobhán O’Grady and Sarah Dadouch,
Bilal Hussein AP
BEIRUT — Rescue operations resumed early Friday for a possible survivor still buried in rubble a month after a devastating explosion at Beirut’s port that destroyed whole neighborhoods and left nearly 200 people dead.
Rescue workers said equipment had again detected what appeared to be a pulse emanating from the ruins of a collapsed building and the shapes of two human forms, one of them a child who may be alive. First registered at 18 beats per minute over 24 hours ago, the pulse had slowed to seven beats per minute by Friday morning, they said.
After 24 hours of painstaking digging, the teams had still not found any sign of life or evidence of bodies, rescue worker Qassem Khatter told reporters at the scene. “Until now there is nothing,” he said.
The rescue effort was launched after a sniffer dog working with Topos, a Chilean rescue team, responded to a smell outside the pile of rubble that was once an elegant but dilapidated four story Ottoman-era house hosting a tequila bar on the ground floor.
The search was briefly suspended late Thursday after Lebanese authorities said they needed to bring a crane that would not be available until Friday morning. But it resumed after furious protesters converged on the scene and threatened to continue the search themselves.
The news that signs of life had been detected a month after the devastating explosion raised hopes across Beirut that some good news may yet emerge from the wreckage of the city.
But it also raised new questions about the rigor of the Lebanese authorities’ search and rescue operations in the wake of the blast. The collapsed building lies on a well-trodden route and has been photographed multiple times by Beirutis as one of the more vivid examples of the devastation.
People in the area had told authorities multiple times that they had detected the smell of a decomposing body coming from the ruins but that no one checked, said Melissa Fadlallah, a Beirut activist who was among the protesters who persuaded the rescuers to resume the search overnight.
“Why did it take a Chilean dog and Chilean technology? Why did it take a month to check the building? How embarrassing is that?” she asked.
“We told you two weeks ago there is a soul there, but we heard nothing from you,” a woman shouted at security forces when they briefly suspended the search overnight.
[After port explosion, Lebanese excavate their dreams]
A French team reported that its sniffer dog detected a smell at the scene last week but that no one followed through, said Edward Bitar of the group Live Love Lebanon, which is helping the rescue effort.
He said he did not want to raise expectations that anyone may yet be found alive after all this time. Local news reports noted that the Chilean team won renown for finding a survivor of the Haitian earthquake still alive in the rubble after 27 days.
Bilal Hussein
AP
A Chilean rescuer holds a signal detecting machine as he helps his team searching in the rubble of a building that collapsed in last month’s massive explosion in Beirut, after getting signals there may be a survivor under the rubble, Friday, Sept. 4, 2020.
