>> Here at the Damage Report, like many people, yesterday morning, we were absolutely shocked
at the footage of a massive explosion going off in a port in Beirut. Wondering what it
means, what effect it's had, how many must have been injured or died in this absolutely
devastating explosion.
And thankfully some information is now starting to be made available. And joining us now to
help understand the situation is investigative journalist and the founder of Beirut Report
Habib Battah, welcome to the Damage Report. >> Thank you, good to be here.
>> Glad to have you here. So, I apologize we were talking before going live with the
interview.
I'm sure you've had to answer many of these questions before so I apologize for that,
but I am curious, when it happened were you nearby? What was that experience like?
>> Well, I had just driven past the explosion site ten minutes earlier, which is the Port
of Beirut.
And you can't avoid the Port of Beirut if you're in Beirut, it's right along the highway.
So I've driven past it my whole life, almost every day at some point and I was very lucky
and thankful that I got out of there. I was in traffic. About ten minutes later I pulled
over to get some stuff from a pharmacy.
I was probably a couple miles away down the highway and I went into the pharmacy and I
heard just like a little thud while I was talking to the pharmacist. And I thought it's
an Israeli sonic boom because I've lived through those my whole life and I thought they must
be bombing the south, having another war as they do.
And so I looked up at the sky and all of us, our instinct as Lebanese is to look up at
the sky when we hear an explosion, cuz we're used to getting the air strikes. And I didn't
see anything and I turned back around to the pharmacist and we're just kind of chit chatting,
joking about situation, how bad it is.
And then it just moved through my body. I mean and the loudest noise you've ever heard
in your life. It felt like the building was collapsing that was behind me.
>> Wow. >> And everybody felt that way. It's like
if you look at the damages, it looks like every building got bombed.
And there are like hundreds of buildings that were affected. And so this is like thousand
times more than the Oklahoma City bombing. It's almost like the closest thing you can
get to an atomic bomb. It was a proper mushroom cloud.
>> Yeah. >> And, it's like a movie, like your worst
fantasy of what it would be like.
In Lebanon, we always think about what it would be like as you're always getting bombed
and yeah it was every bit that, and I could just feel it in my bones and it kind of just
stays with you. Even if you're not injured, just the vibration and I just jumped in my
car.
And I raced home, and people were driving crazy and people were outside of their homes
and everybody was outside looking and police were looking and it's like when the police
don't know what's going on. That feels really weird. And as I got a little bit higher, I
live a little bit in the hill, just right outside of Beirut.
I could see the whole city was in a cloud as big as the city, of black smoke. It was
totally like you couldn't see the city anymore. So I was very lucky, I was very lucky because
a lot of people were badly injured, 5,000 people. 200,000 the government says are homeless
tonight-
>> An entire city. >> Well, I mean the city probably is about
a million and a half >> I mean, but like it's a city full of people
effectively that have been made homeless inside of this larger city and it's just devastating
on top of the deaths and the injuries, the long term impact, I can't even imagine the
scale.
You felt the shockwave miles away. I'm curious when-
>> People heard it in Cyprus, which is like 150 miles away.
>> Wow. And you said you were talking to people, people are trying to figure out what what
happened. They're trying to read from the authorities. Do they have any information?
I mean, like because there was the fire beforehand, many people were filming it and so everyone
has now seen any number of different shots of it. It really did look like a small instantaneous
nuclear weapon had exploded very briefly. Was there a widespread belief that this was
some sort of attack?
Did it take long for the information about what the nature of the bomb actually was to
distribute? >> Yeah, I mean living here, you get a flashback
every time there's a bombing, you remember the last big bombing that you went through.
And I always started thinking about the assassination of the Prime Minister back in 2005 and how
that shook the building that I was in.
But this felt like twice as strong. I felt the vibration of American made bunker buster
bombs that Israel has dropped so many times on this city during the 2006 war. And this
was nothing compared to those. I mean, this was just like a times ten. And so you think
immediately we're under attack, that's what I thought.
We're under attack and I gotta run, I gotta take cover but then you think do I drive slow,
do I drive fast? Will I get hit, will I not get hit? We've lived our lives like this,
but this felt like wow, this is a really escalation. I mean for people from Beirut to say that
this was the biggest bomb that they've seen that's saying a lot.
Because we've seen almost every kind of bomb in this city over the past 30 years. So yeah,
we did feel like we're under attack and everybody thought it was a plane, an airstrike, or an
assassination, two of the main kind of avenues of violence that we've seen. Munitions delivered
to us.
So yeah, it was really a feeling of anxiety
and fear.