Search for Possible Survivor Continues at Destroyed Mar Mikhail Building

Rescuers resumed a search Friday for possible survivors under rubble in a destroyed Beirut building, buoyed by faint hopes of a miracle a month after a monster blast ripped through the city's port.

The cataclysmic August 4 explosion killed 191 people, making it Lebanon's deadliest peacetime disaster. One month on, seven people are still missing.

Hopes emerged Thursday that one of them could be found alive after a specialist sensor device detected a heart beat under the debris of a collapsed building located between the hard-hit districts of Gemmayzeh and Mar Mikhail.

"I was not aware I needed a miracle that much. Please God, give Beirut this miracle it deserves," said Selim Mourad, a 32-year-old filmmaker.

Chilean and Lebanese rescuers on Friday lifted chunks of rubble from the site.

"The experts working with us discovered that someone was breathing slowly under the rubble, at a depth of three metres (yards)," the head of the Chilean rescue team, Francisco Lermanda, said.

"We had to dig three tunnels to reach the spot where the pulse was detected," he told reporters Friday evening.

The painstaking task is continuing, but it is unclear whether "the person is alive or dead," Lermanda added.

In remarks to LBCI TV, he said "We won't use the dog today and we'll suspend work at 10pm before resuming it in the early morning."

The pulse had slowed significantly on Friday compared to a previous recording, said rescue coordinator Nicholas Saade.

"After removing the big chunks we scanned again for heartbeats or respiration, it showed low beat/respiration" levels of seven per minute, he said.

"The reading before was about 16 to 18."

"Ninety-nine percent there isn't anything, but even if there is less than 1% hope, we should keep on looking," Youssef Malah, a well-known civil defense worker, said Thursday. He said the work was extremely sensitive.

A Chilean volunteer, however, said their equipment identifies breathing and heartbeat from humans, not animals, and it detected a sign of a human. The worker, who identified himself as Francisco Lermanda, said it is rare, but not unheard of, for someone to survive under the rubble for a month.

The past few weeks have been extremely hot in Lebanon, including a current heat wave with high levels of humidity.

Every now and then, the Chilean team asked people on the streets, including a crowd of journalists watching the operation, to turn off their mobiles and stay quiet for five minutes so as not to interfere with the sounds being detected by their instruments.

Two days after the explosion, a French rescue team and Lebanese civil defense volunteers had looked into the rubble of the same building, where the ground floor used to be a bar. At the time, they had no reason to believe there were any bodies or survivors left at the site.

French civil engineer Emmanuel Durand, who is assisting the rescue effort, said 3D mapping scans of the building had so far shown no signs of life.

"What we have seen so far is, unfortunately, no trace of any victim or body. We have been conducting two scans on two different rooms," he said.

- Chilean 'heroes' -

The area being excavated was among the hardest hit by the blast that was so powerful it was heard in Cyprus, some 240 kilometers away.

The explosion piled on new misery for Lebanese already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic and the country's worst economic crisis in decades.

A sniffer dog deployed by Chilean rescuers on Wednesday night had responded to a scent from the site, Beirut governor Marwan Abboud said.

After detecting a pulse on Thursday, Lebanese rescuers teamed up with the Chileans to find survivors.

They moved Friday in the "direction of the signal," trying to find a tunnel or entry point giving access to a "survivor or corpse," Saade said.

Lebanon lacks the tools and expertise to handle advanced search and rescue operations which are now being supported by international experts.

The Chileans arrived recently with a sniffer dog, as well as specialist sensors that can detect heart beats and breathing.

They have been praised as heroes by many Lebanese who have compared their expertise with the lackluster performance of what they see as an absent state.

"Shows you how low we are on the priority ladder of these insects ruling us," said one on Twitter.

-'Heartless officials' -

Lebanese authorities came under more fire from an anxious public after Thursday's search and rescue operation was paused for two hours.

The army said Friday the efforts had been halted because chunks of the building's wall could fall on rescuers.

Work was resumed at 2230 GMT after military engineers with the help of two cranes "managed to secure the building," it said.

The stoppage sparked an outcry online.

"There is a heart beating in Mar Mikhail, and there are heartless officials who decided to stop the rescue operation," activist Zahia Awad tweeted.

As well as killing more than 190 people, the explosion injured at least 6,500 and left 300,000 homeless.

UNICEF on Friday said "600,000 children live within a 20-kilometer radius of the blast and could be suffering negative short-term and long-term psychological impacts."

Hassan Diab, who quit along with his government after the blast, said 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had blown up. The fertilizer had been stored in a warehouse for years without precautions.

Several gatherings, including a minute's silence, organized by civil society groups and families of the victims are planned for Friday afternoon to mark one month since the blast.

"One month later, still removing the rubble, trying desperately to recover life," American University of Beirut professor Mona Fawaz tweeted.

"The city is deeply wounded. It will take a lot to move forward, we have not even begun the work."