Editorials

BEIRUT EXPLOSION

05/08/20 16:51 Filed in: Current Affairs

I was in Beirut for a week after Rafic Hariri was blown-up on Valentine’s Day in 2005.

The energy released from a large bomb scrambles your brain. You see things that happened in a second that you just can’t believe. Metal bent in an instant that would otherwise take a blacksmith and roaring fire, an hour of sweat and toil.

Our hotel, The Phoenicia, not in the direct line from the blast, was damaged so badly it took three months to repair. The St.George Hotel, next to the blast has never reopened. Whilst our hotel had just resumed operations, the entire area was still taped-off, waiting for United Nations investigators to finish.

In the same street as the blast, about fifty parked cars completely written-off. For about two hundred metres up the road. They never show that in the movies.

You can draw lines from the blast. If there is anything substantial between you and the blast, you survive. If there isn’t, you die, or receive hideous injuries. In the park over the road, the line of the blast was delineated by the clear grass. The chlorophyll had been blown out of the grass. Right next to it the grass was still green.

Everything around the blast goes up, and then comes down.

The V8 engine from Hariri’s car, (as it passed the van that exploded), detached itself from the gearbox and engine mounts, and was blown up through the bonnet, over the 12 story building next to it, then over the eight story HSBC Bank building, landing on the roof of our hotel, 16 storeys up. What would take mechanics hours to achieve, was done in a second.

I spoke with the Security Guard of the HSBC Bank who was standing in the doorway, protected from the blast. He described seeing the effects of the blast, but never heard anything. The pressure wave blew out both of his eardrums.

All of this is to help you realise that the people of Beirut could do with your thoughts about now.

70 were killed, and as of this moment, 4,000 have been injured.*

It’s night there now, and the number of injuries will be much higher when the sun comes up.

_____________________



Incidentally, the BBC reports that today’s explosion:

“ … comes at a sensitive time for Lebanon, with an economic crisis reigniting old divisions. Tensions are also high ahead of Friday's verdict in a trial over the killing of ex-Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.”


*24 hours after the blast at the Beirut Port on the 5th August 2020, 135 dead, 5,000 wounded, and approximately 200,000 displaced from their homes.



Hariri_AboveFrom Balloon
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Hariri_From Hotel_WIDE
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Hariri_Looking SW_ Park
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Hariri_Looking south on road
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