‘Get down! Get out!’: Surviving Beirut’s 2020 blast

This story is part of the July 27 edition of Good Weekend.See all 12 stories.

My wife Caitlin came in one evening just after six, bringing with her that week’s mail, which we opened in the kitchen. Chatting, we wandered into our bedroom on the other side of the apartment, where our cat Jazzy lavished attention on Caitlin and ignored me, as usual. In the middle of our conversation, in the middle of a sentence, there came a strange howl and an immense, shuddering crash from somewhere not too distant. We felt tremors beneath our feet. From our bedroom window we could see nothing unusual. We looked at each other. That, we knew, must have been an explosion.

Caitlin needed to find out what such an event could mean. She did not have her phone on her: she had left it in the kitchen. She walked quickly through the apartment to fetch it. I followed. Our paths took us past the floor-to-ceiling windows, which looked out towards the sea. Caitlin reached the kitchen and picked up her phone. I was crossing the threshold out of the dining area when the entire building rocked. The floor bounced beneath us. Caitlin shouted: “Get down! Get out!”

A shadow, like a bird crossing the sun, came rushing at our windows. At one blow, with a surge of thunder, the tall windows crashed in and a wall of air punched its way through the middle of the apartment, like an express train howling down a tunnel. I never completed my final stride into the kitchen. As the blast tore through the apartment, it sent a piece of glass or metal flying into the last part of me that had not crossed the kitchen threshold: my exposed right heel. I was barefoot. The gash spat blood in all directions. I was blown into the kitchen and up against the ­pantry cupboard, its doors flailing.

Next thing, the rush of air stopped pressing on us and there was a shock the other way, followed by the sounds of solid objects cracking, a force I felt right through the walls and floor and my own chest, like cannon shots.

Blood was pouring over Caitlin’s left temple and down her cheek. She seemed not to feel it, for she was looking me up and down, then she grabbed me, as I grabbed her, and ran her hands quickly over my ­shoulders and arms, as I then did over hers, finding nothing broken. As my mind began rushing back to me, something bit into my right heel. Pain bolted up my right side and my whole right leg recoiled from touching the floor. Still holding Caitlin by the shoulders, I staggered and lurched on my left foot, which shuffled over shards of broken glass. Caitlin led me the few steps to the kitchen counter – it was suddenly sheeted with thick dust that caked onto my palms – and before I could speak she reached down and began to prise loose from my heel something hard and flat that had buried itself in the flesh like an escaped saw blade, dug in but still protruding. Caitlin pulled the whole object out hard, threw it away. Blood ran.

The lighting over the stairs guttered and blinked and was blacked out in parts. Alarms wailed.

I strangled a shriek, but to my own surprise came back to myself and understood that although the wound was deep, it had been cut in at a shaving angle, downwards not inwards. The flesh could be held closed. I managed to recall that in my pocket I had a handkerchief, which I grabbed and pressed to my heel with all the strength I could summon.

Writer Theodore Ell and wife Caitlin in happier times in Beirut, Lebanon’s capital.Credit: Courtesy of Theodore Ell

Recovering some breath, I gasped out something to Caitlin about the stream of blood down her face, barely hearing the words I spoke. Caitlin raised a trembling hand to her temple and brought it away, staring at the blood on her fingertips. A tea towel or dishcloth had been blown onto the bench near us. She took it and wiped some of the blood off herself, only to smear onto her face the sickly, reddish dust that was swimming through the air and sticking to every surface, carrying a fetid smell. Caitlin recoiled from dabbing a wound from an opened existing scar, but the bleeding was ­already slowing.

Having staunched our injuries, we staggered from the kitchen into the entrance hall to find the top half of the heavy front door blown outwards. Pieces of that timber slab were propped against the lift, which had been vomited out of its shaft and into the stairwell. The lighting over the stairs guttered and blinked and was blacked out in parts. Alarms wailed. A siren in the echoing stairwell. Our smoke alarm was at screaming pitch somewhere still near the ceiling, among cables that swung.

We kept a small first-aid kit in the drawer of the hall table that had been picked up and thrown, upside down, against the opposite wall. I wrenched the drawer out, emptying its contents. From the kit, Caitlin took a roll of tape with which she strapped the handkerchief to my heel. She waved away my offer to stick something over the gash on her forehead. What … what do we …

Words were useless. Caitlin held up her phone to me. She meant to start her emergency contact procedure – even now, she meant to do her job.

I motioned to the spare bedroom, where our survival kits and safe were, and Caitlin nodded. The door to that room was off its hinges, barring the way. Wooden framing and cupboard doors had fallen, crossed, in front of it. I threw the framing aside and leaned all my weight against the loosened door. It fell straight, head down, onto the bed in the middle of the room and sent glass shards ­flying. I forced open a cupboard door that hung from a single hinge and, again in disbelief at my own deliberateness, jabbed the combination code into the panel of numbers on the safe door. The safe still worked. I retrieved our passports. Pulling open another cupboard, I lifted out the two emergency backpacks we had assembled, those survival bags stocked with small first-aid kits, sterilising wipes, ­toiletries, medication and small packets of biscuits and sweets, all of which we had kept replenished even as we assured ourselves they would never be needed.

I had to put something on my feet. From beneath the wreckage I dug out a pair of sandals, pathetic protection against glass and wreckage, but at least they would reinforce the strapping on the handkerchief over my heel.

I did not stay to look further at the damage but thought of our cat Jazzy. I left the study and tried to climb over the heap of fallen ­sections of ceiling to get into our bedroom, where I last remembered seeing her. The doorway was impassable. I had no way of knowing if Jazzy was still inside or if she had been picked up and hurled six ­storeys down. I retreated from that doorway.

On the other side of the wreckage, Caitlin was at last speaking to someone. She ended the call as I began clambering back over the wreckage to her.

“I’ve no idea where Jazzy is,” I cried over the noise.

“We have to call home,” she shouted in my ear.

“What?”

“Call your parents. I’ll call mine.”

I realised that my phone was in my other pocket. I dialled my parents’ home. When my mother answered, I had first to tell her – alarms ever screeching – that we were alive. I described what I could of the event, ­panting and halting as my gorge rose – I was nearly sick as my surroundings forced themselves into words in my own mouth – and explained that we had a plan (what plan?), that the embassy would come and get us, that we were going to get out. I begged her not to turn on the television, not to look at the news. Something told me already that, whatever had happened, it would be heard about.

I promised my parents – my father by now awake, too, and in the background – that I would keep in touch, tell them what was happening. I do not know how I found the nerve to end the call.

Caitlin was on her phone again, her other hand to her face, kneading her brow. Suddenly, a voice called in to us. “Are you all right?” From the flickering near-­darkness of the stairwell, a young man with a bloodied bald patch shone a torch across the room into my face. “I’m from upstairs.”

We had never seen him. “Upstairs?”

“Ja … just moving.” I could not speak.

“Are you OK?” he shouted again.

“Yes … yes. Small injuries,” I stammered. “You?”

“OK. Where are you from?”

“What do you mean?”

“Where are you from?”

“Australia … the Australian embassy.”

“OK. I’m with the German embassy. You getting help? We can help each other. Later. But if you don’t need help now, I have to go.”

“Go … go where?”

“They’re calling me out, my embassy. I have to help. Someone isn’t replying … If you’re all right –”

I promised my parents that I would keep in touch, tell them what was happening. I do not know how I found the nerve to end the call.

Caitlin paused her phone call to her parents and called over her shoulder to him: “I’m the deputy. The deputy ambassador. We’ll call you.”

“OK. Well. I’m consular. We will help each other later. But I have to go now, if you’re OK.”

“Yes! You go!” Caitlin shouted. “We’ll call you when we can!”

“Ja, OK, good luck!”

The torch beam lifted off me as the young man vanished behind the halved front door and down the stairs.

Hundreds died, 7000 were wounded and 300,000 left homeless after the 2020 explosion in Beirut’s port.Credit: AFP

Other voices began to reach me. Screams from down in the street or from high up, somewhere in the condominiums, from which hung innards of cabling, steel ducts, great scabs of walls and floors.

Something was rising over me, over all of it, darkening even this strange, storming murk. Mushrooming, scowling. A red cloud. Rolling, fuming into the sky like a giant enraged creature, poised to stamp its other foot. Equalling the mountain ranges in height but rooted to the ground. Tied to somewhere on the seafront. Behind the concrete silos that were sagging and bowed, creased as paper.

“The port – it was at the port,” I began to call to Caitlin.

“Delta four! Delta four!” shouted another voice – to my left, outside, out of the ash-filled air, somehow level with me. “Delta four!”

I stood paralysed in the face of the screaming city, unable to fix the source of the words, this ­woman’s voice, nearby – then on the small balcony directly opposite there emerged the silhouette of our friend Rani, struggling with one hand at something in the doorway, while ­crying “Delta four!” into a walkie-talkie in her other hand. I called her name.

She wheeled around. “Are you all right?” she yelled.

I nodded and pointed behind me, to where Caitlin stood inside. “You?”

“I can’t reach Mark [her partner]!”

I cupped both hands around my ears.

“I can’t reach Mark! I don’t know where he is.”

It took me several long moments to take in what she had said.

I replied, “What, what – is he inside?”

“Can you call him? Call him!” Rani cried. “I don’t have my phone. I’m trapped.”

Beyond her, I could see stacked, leaning, malformed shapes. The balcony, that tiny exposed ledge, must have saved her from an interior collapse. She began attacking a board or a plank that lay across the ­doorway, trying to pull it free.

My phone was still in my hand. I looked up Mark’s number and tried to call him. There came the ­muffled, faraway sound of Mark’s voice, asking me to leave a message. I shouted to Rani, “Where did he go? Do you know where he went?”

“The gym. He’s at the gym.”

“Where?”

“Mar Mikhael.”

The rooftops of Mar Mikhael (St Michael), even closer to the port, were scarcely visible in the smoke. Coldness came over me. “I’ll – I’ll keep trying.”

“We need to go,” said a voice beside me. Caitlin had picked her way around the wreckage and was touching my elbow. She called out across the gap: “Do you need us to come for you?”

“I’m radioing,” Rani answered, her free hand tugging out a thick white board by inches. “Please keep trying Mark.”

“Can we come for you?” Caitlin called again. “Can we throw you something?”

At that moment, somewhere down among the lanes, or perhaps from a rooftop or a window that we could not see, over the coalescing sounds of crashing masonry and human screams came a series of dry, studding bangs from a machine gun being fired into the air.

We retreated from the edge of the window, breath racing. “There might be another,” Caitlin told me.

“Another?”

“Explosion. We have to get out.”

“Rani!” I called, straining even to hear myself. “I’ll keep trying Mark and tell him where you are –”

“No! No! It’s all right!” she answered. She was standing back from the doorway. The shadows of the fallen woodwork inside were being pushed and thrown apart. Then Mark stood on the balcony, bleeding from cuts to his legs and face, sweating and staring. He and Rani held each other for a moment.

Then he called across to us: “Are you all right?”

“What happened? Do you know what happened?”

“Something … at the port.”

We stood, all four staring.

“I … I was on my bike. Then … I just ran,” was all Mark could say.

More gunfire erupted, somewhere further out, the sound coming at us down the howling walls of Gemmayzeh Street. Caitlin tightened her grip on my elbow. She called to Mark and Rani: “Go back in if you can. Will someone come for you?”

Mark nodded. “That whole room’s come down … but we can go through it now.”

“We’ll keep radioing,” Rani replied. “We’ll call you.”

“Go in. Go in and keep down.”

I was conscious that faith in procedure was all we had. Call “Delta four” into a walkie-talkie and someone in the UN building downtown will understand and send help. Make emergency phone calls according to a rehearsed pattern on an embassy phone and someone will come. Yet as we withdrew and I looked one more time at Rani and Mark ducking into their doorway and beginning to negotiate the debris inside, the nature of what was happening came home to me. From the size and frenzy of the red cloud rising over the shore, from the thousands of voices rising in wails, from the force that could have broken my body as it slammed me up against the kitchen wall, from the bursts of gunfire, it was possible no one would come. The city was probably dead, or soon to die.

I took one more look around in case Jazzy might emerge from a corner or from under the looser debris, but nothing stirred. We collected our survival-kit ­backpacks and pulled open the surviving lower half of the front door.

In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, the couple’s cat Jazzy went missing.Credit: Courtesy of Theodore Ell

The stairwell was choked with material – foam insulation, lengths of wire, lumps of marble and concrete and everywhere the covering of glass – but we inched past the lift, which sat canted over on the landing, and began picking our way downwards. Caitlin walked in front, supporting me when I had to put weight on my right foot. More than once I slipped on the dust and fine glass but grabbed at the railing and kept upright. As we went down, the carpet of wreckage and rubbish deepened around our ankles. We called in at each ruined entry but found no one.

At last, we reached the ground. Outside in the lane, a multitude of people had appeared from nowhere, more than there had been during the [2005] revolution. They were rushing in all directions. Some were yelling directions or pleading for help. I caught sight of a man and a woman staggering along, the woman’s right arm slung across the man’s shoulders, a dripping stump where her left arm had been. Men on motorbikes and scooters, some with other men or women riding pillion, pushed and wove among the people. The headlights of cars inched and butted their way through.

Screams and drawn-out despairing cries in Arabic rang out. Appeals to God I could make out, and names of the dead, perhaps. Other words escaped me, but the sheer terror in the voices was enough to understand. One man’s voice rose to a screeching falsetto: “Al-nawawi! Al-nawawi!”

Caitlin shook her head. “No. It can’t have been nuclear.”

Screams and drawn-out despairing cries in Arabic rang out. Appeals to God I could make out, and names of the dead, perhaps.

We stepped back, out of sight of the street, onto the landing where the stairwell reached the ground and another flight of stairs continued down into the car park and the basement.

“Is it worth going down? To bring out the car?” I asked.

“We’ll never get anywhere. I’m making calls. They’ll come and get us.”

We looked around at the ruined foyer and surveyed the stairwell, taking in the black steel plating, unbroken, which under-girded the marble stairs. Here we might stand a chance of being protected or of fleeing outside if the rest of the building fell, and of staying out of sight of whoever, for all we knew, might be taking control of the streets, firing at survivors, preparing to detonate another blast or launch another missile.

I took my backpack off and Caitlin helped me lower myself onto the basement stairs. Pain sang up from my heel.

Caitlin sat down next to me and took out her phone again. Messages had reached her. She began reading, replying, tapping at the screen, for a length of time I did not perceive.

I opened my kit, rummaged for a water bottle and found none.

“Do you have water?”

“No.”

“Of all the … How did we –”

“It’s all right. They’re coming.”

“I’ll go up and –”

“No. They are coming. Roy is out with the armoured car.”

“He’s all right?”

“We’re finding out who’s hurt, who needs help. He’ll go to them. And he’ll come to us.”

“Do we know what did it?”

“Not yet.”

Her phone rang. “It’s Tel Aviv.”

“Tel Aviv?”

“The embassy there. It’s all right.”

Caitlin stood up and climbed a few steps to answer the call.

I drew out my own phone. Messages had come from the strangest assortment of friends, far from Lebanon, in Canberra, Sydney, Dubai, London, some of whom had not contacted me for years. All reported learning of a cataclysm and asking where we were, if we were safe. As I began to answer I was drawn to mentions of footage, of eyewitnesses talking to the world.

I looked at news websites. Only when a single dull fact made itself clear was I able to stop looking. A ­warehouse had been burning – out of sight for hours, even as I sat working beside the study window. Nothing had struck it. The explosion, the volcano of rust-red that erupted into the sky, had come from inside.

Caitlin was sitting beside me again. “Did you see?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“It wasn’t the Israelis.”

Witnesses later said the catastrophic blast had been sparked by a fire in a warehouse near silos containing ­hundreds of tonnes of explosive ammonium nitrate that had been incautiously stored for many years.

Caitlin’s hand was on my shoulder, gently shaking me. She helped me up. My hips and back ached severely from sitting motionless on the steps and my right heel was in extreme pain, but I managed to stand. We ­shouldered our kits, slowly crossed the foyer with ­fragments of material crunching and grinding under every step, and went out into the lane.

“To the right.”

We mingled among people weaving their way between cars. Every street lamp was dark. Out of the monastery driveway, monks in brown habits were trooping one by one, carrying luggage, to join a column of people moving up the hill towards Achrafieh, out of this low-lying place, away from the sea. I struggled to look for faces I knew. As we stumbled into the junction and cars came nosing close to our legs from two directions, our friend Michaela stepped into the crowd, calling our names.

An aid team amid the wreckage. Credit: NurPhoto via AFP

In the armoured four-wheel-drive, a steel-reinforced and high-riding car reserved for official travel, were six of us whom Roy, a fellow Australian diplomat, had ­managed to reach. The car’s clock showed the time was nearing midnight.

Caitlin and Roy conferred. The way they spoke, it might have been a routine diplomatic visit. They ­discussed routes and timing, possible obstacles, the arrangements that would await us when we “got there”. As Roy manoeuvred the car into the traffic, Caitlin ­explained to the rest of us that we would head west, through Hamra, to the ambassador’s residence, which was undamaged – and not to the embassy. All our ­planning had always cast the embassy as the refuge, but it was too heavily damaged.

Not one piece of our neighbourhood had escaped being mutilated. The entire structure of the old city had been altered, whole buildings rocked and shifted off their feet, their weight still swaying. Further on, the hulks of the downtown buildings burnt out during the revolution and the civil war looked no different, but there was a glimpse of al-Amin Mosque, its four minarets still standing, but its dome ­apparently dented and misshapen, the crescent moon at the summit knocked sideways on its pediment.

As the lift began to rise, it crossed my mind that the ambassador’s apartment might not be the safest place for us, perched as it was at the top of a building more than 20 storeys high that could snap like a matchstick in a second blast. But being hoisted up, out of the streets and into the quiet of a still-furnished home, the greater need was to rest. Those of our embassy group who lived in Hamra had gathered there, and with the ambassador and her husband they helped us to chairs and sofas. From the kitchen came a smell of cooking. Roy, untiring, came around to each of us with his field medicine kit to dress wounds. He pulled the larger pieces of glass out of my feet.

One after another, the stories of bare survival stammered to a close and there was silence in those large, lamplit rooms. We drifted. Some of those rescued lay down. Others sat, looking at nothing. I withdrew to the far end of the enclosed balcony, switched the lights out and sat still, trying to think beyond rooms and walls. Gold and white lights glittered in gatherings and chains along distant mountainsides. Closer in, where the slopes came down out of the night towards the sea, among the crowding, blocked-in shapes of lower intervening buildings, fragments of East Beirut came and went behind tatters of rising smoke. Where the port should have been, there was a shrouded firepit.

I could not go to sleep.

Postscript: Jazzy was found healthy and alive in the ruins of Theodore and Caitlin’s apartment building the next afternoon. The couple are now based in Canberra, where Theodore is an honorary lecturer in literature at Australian National University. This is an edited extract from Theodore Ell’s Lebanon Days, out July 30 (Atlantic Books Australia, $35).

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