After Deadly Beirut Explosion, a Search for Answers and Survivors: Live Updates

Search is on for survivors after blast kills more than 100.

Rescue workers still struggling to treat thousands of people wounded in an enormous explosion that rocked Beirut turned their attention on Wednesday morning to the desperate search for survivors.

The blast, so powerful it could be felt more than 150 miles away in Cyprus, leveled whole sections of the city near the port of Beirut, leaving nothing but twisted metal and debris for blocks in Beirut’s downtown business district.

The waterfront neighborhood normally full of restaurants and nightclubs was essentially flattened. A number of crowded residential neighborhoods in the city’s eastern and predominantly Christian half were also ravaged.

Nearly all the windows along one popular commercial strip had been blown out and the street was littered with glass, rubble and cars that had slammed into each other after the blast. The buildings that remained standing in the blast area looked as if they had been skinned, leaving only hulking skeletons.

The death toll rose to over 100 and with an untold number still missing and officials expected that figure to rise. More than 4,00 people were injured, overwhelming the city’s hospitals.

“What we are witnessing is a huge catastrophe,” the head of Lebanon’s Red Cross George Kettani told the news network Mayadeen. “There are victims and casualties everywhere.”

With electricity out in most of the city, emergency workers were limited in what they could do until the sun rose.

Emergency workers joined residents scattered across the wreckage digging through the rubble even fires still smoldered around them.

“There are many people missing until now. People are asking the emergency department about their loved ones and it is difficult to search at night because there is no electricity,” health minister Hamad Hasan told Reuters.

“We need everything to hospitalize the victims, and there is an acute shortage of everything,” Mr. Hassan told local news stations on Wednesday morning.

Officials said it appeared the blast was caused by the detonation of more than 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, a chemical commonly used in fertilizer and bombs, which had been stored in a warehouse at the port since it was confiscated from a cargo ship in 2014.

“As head of the government, I will not relax until we find the responsible party for what happened, hold it accountable and apply the most serious punishments against it,” Prime Minister Hassan Diab said.

Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, the head of Lebanon’s general security service, told the state-run news agency that “highly explosive materials” had been seized by the government years ago and were stored near the blast site. Although the possibility that the explosives had been intentionally set off was being probed, he warned against getting “ahead of the investigation” and speculating that it was a terrorist act.

The Lebanese Red Cross said that every available ambulance from North Lebanon, Bekaa and South Lebanon was being dispatched to Beirut to help patients and engaged in search and rescue operations.

At least four large hospitals in Beirut were so severely damaged by the explosion that they were unable to admit patients, doctors said. Health care workers were injured and killed in the blast, and a warehouse storing much of the country’s vaccine supply was believed to have been razed.

An official at American University Hospital in Beirut, the country’s most prestigious and largest private hospital, said they were sending noncritical patients to hospitals outside the capital.

At least four nurses died and five doctors were wounded at St. George Hospital, one of the hardest hit, according to Dr. Joseph Haddad, the director of the hospital’s intensive care unit. One nurse scooped up three premature infants from the natal intensive care unit, where glass was blown in and the ceiling partially collapsed, and screamed for help as she held their fragile bodies to her chest.

Dr. Haddad had just finished his rounds and was walking home when the explosion struck. He rushed to check on his family and found his apartment completely destroyed.

He then returned to the hospital to get to work, expecting to be busy stitching up patients injured in the blast and saving lives. But he discovered that the hospital, too, was in rubble.

“The patients were coming down the stairs, the elevators weren’t working. They were walking down from as high as nine floors up,” Dr. Haddad said. “It was the deepest hell of an apocalypse. When I went back to my home an hour later, people were crying in the streets.”

“Every floor of the hospital is damaged. I didn’t see this even during the war. It’s a catastrophe,” said Dr. Peter Noun, the head of St. George Hospital’s Pediatric Hematology and Oncology Department. “The damage is extremely bad. All the rooms are damaged. All the parents and their children were in their rooms. Everything just fell down, the windows destroyed, the ceiling in pieces.”

In addition to taking out some of the capital’s most important hospitals, worries mounted over hundreds of thousands of vaccines and medications that are stored at the Ministry of Public Health-run central medical warehouse at Karantina, located a half a mile from the port where the explosion took place.

The vaccines and medications stored at the warehouse are used to prevent infectious diseases in children under 5 years old and to treat acute sicknesses as well as cancer and autoimmune diseases.

The science behind the blast: Why fertilizer packs a punch.

When an explosive compound detonates, it releases gas that rapidly expands. This “shock wave” is essentially a wall of dense air that can cause damage, and it dissipates as it spreads further out. A mass of exploding ammonium nitrate produces a blast that moves at many times the speed of sound, and this wave can reflect and bounce as it moves — especially in an urban area like the Beirut waterfront — destroying some buildings while leaving others relatively undamaged

The explosive power of ammonium nitrate can be difficult to quantify in absolute terms, given its age and the conditions in which it has been stored. However, it could be as high as about 40 percent of the power of TNT.

At 40 percent the power of TNT, the detonation of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate could produce 1 p.s.i. of overpressure — defined as the pressure caused by a shock wave over and above normal atmospheric pressure — as far as 6,600 feet away. The same explosion would produce 27 p.s.i. at a range of 793 feet away, which would destroy most buildings, and kill people either through direct trauma or being struck by debris.

Accidental detonation of ammonium nitrate has caused a number of deadly industrial accidents, including the worst in United States history: In 1947, a ship carrying an estimated 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded in the harbor of Texas City, Texas, starting a chain reaction of blasts and blazes that killed 581 people.

The chemical has also been the primary ingredient in bombs used in several terrorist attacks, including the destruction of the federal office building in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed 168 people. That bomb contained about two tons of ammonium nitrate.

Vivian Yee, a correspondent for The New York Times, was at home in Beirut when two explosions convulsed the city. This is her first-person account of what happened.

I was just about to look at a video a friend had sent me on Tuesday afternoon — “the port seems to be burning,” she said — when my whole building shook. Uneasily, naïvely, I ran to the window, then back to my desk to check for news.

Then came a much bigger boom, and the sound itself seemed to splinter. There was shattered glass flying everywhere. Not thinking but moving, I ducked under my desk.

When the world stopped cracking open, I couldn’t see at first because of the blood running down my face. After blinking the blood from my eyes, I tried to take in the sight of my apartment turned into a demolition site. My yellow front door had been hurled on top of my dining table. I couldn’t find my passport, or sturdy shoes.

Later, someone would tell me that Beirutis of her generation, raised during Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, instinctively ran into their hallways as soon as they heard the first blast, to escape the glass they knew would break.

I was not so well-trained, but the Lebanese who would help me in the hours to come had the steadiness that comes from having lived through countless previous disasters. Nearly all were strangers, yet they treated me like a friend.

When I got downstairs, someone passing on a motorbike saw my bloody face and told me to hop on.

Everyone on the street seemed to be either bleeding from open gashes or swathed in makeshift bandages — all except one woman in a chic, backless top leading a small dog on a leash. Only an hour before, we had all been walking dogs or checking email or grocery shopping. Only an hour before, there had been no blood.

Reporting was contributed by Ben Hubbard, Vivian Yee, Hwaida Saad, Maria Abi-Habib, John Ismay, Russell Goldman and Marc Santora.