Beirut blast: HEARTBEATS under the rubble

Shafaq News / On Thursday, rescue teams have resumed searching for possible missing people under the rubble of a building destroyed in the Beirut Port blast, after a specialized Chilean team detected indications of at least a body and monitored a heartbeat, according to Beirut Governor Marwan Abboud.

A month has passed since the Beirut explosion on August 4, however, the news spread quickly in Lebanon and on social media, reviving hopes of finding survivors.

Official Data indicate that at least seven people are still missing since the huge explosion that rocked Beirut, killing more than 190 people, and injuring 6,500 others.

While inspecting the search work on Mar Mikhael Street in Beirut, Abboud said that a rescue squad had recently arrived from Chile, and one of the dogs trained in it had identified an odor.

After the team inspected the building whose upper floors collapsed, through a specialized thermal scanning device, it became clear, according to Abboud, that “there appears to be one or two corpses (...), and there may be alive,” adding that the device detected a “heartbeat”.

According to residents of the neighborhood, the building, which had a bar on its ground floor, turned into rubble, making the searches "sensitive and accurate," according to Abboud.

Lebanon has neither disaster management equipment nor technical capabilities.

Several countries rushed to send relief and technical assistance teams after the explosion, which caused the displacement of about 300,000 people.

"We are now working to raise the filling to reach the two people with a depth of approximately two meters," said First Lieutenant Michel Murr, from the Beirut Fire Brigade, adding, "We are trying as much as possible to find out if there are any neighborhoods."

A Lebanese rescue worker involved in the removal of rubble told the local channel LBCI that the scanning device took "19 breaths per minute," indicating that there are other possibilities than life, but he confirmed that "the dog is trained to discover the smell of humans only."

The Lebanese reacted with great emotion to the possible presence of neighborhoods. One of the tweeters wrote, "There is a heart beating, Beirut."

Another tweet read: "More than six million beats at the same moment call for one person to beat under the rubble."