How I Survived The Beirut Explosion | Minutes With | @LADbible TV

and i remember unlocking my phone and what's up was on and i kind of closed what's up and clicked on the camera and the second i clicked the film i saw what i guess the whole world saw [Music] what were you doing the day of the explosion the day of the explosion august 4th so joe um one of my best friends he decided that he wanted to have burgers from from this one little place in in downtown beirut in madame hill is this very vibrant little area where you know it's full of pubs and bars and restaurants and shops and clubs and all sorts of things right about when we finished at this point it was around six six pm beiru time um we heard a loud explosion and we saw the the uh the glass screen of the store facing the burger shop kind of shake and start the crack so i felt like the building was going to collapse on us so we run out of the store and i pulled joe and kareem and we get out and i look to the left and like it's like kind of like down the street and that's where the port is so at the end of the street you kind of get to an intersection where you can see the port and uh i'm kind of standing at the intersection of the street where there's actually nothing between me and the port from that point to ground zero that warehouse of basically where where things started um i was 650 meters away and i'm looking at this huge cloud of smoke that's just going up and there were sparks in it and it looked like things were happening i mean and in that moment you're kind of paralyzed at the thought of what's going on um i mean i remember thinking is this war like is was it an attack what's going on like what are we gonna do where do we go and i remember unlocking my phone and what's up was on and i kind of closed what's up and clicked on the camera and the second i clicked the film i saw what i guess the whole world saw what did that impact feel like when i hit you it's impossible to describe there's nothing like it i mean when you want to describe something you try to find the closest thing to it there was nothing like that feeling um i mean i'm a i'm a pretty big guy it's not easy to be thrown around like i'm like a feather and uh yeah i mean they say like your life flashes before your eyes all i could remember while i was kind of like flying um was that image of the explosion and just the sound and being in complete shock of like what the [ __ ] was that i remember the first thing i felt was dust filling the back of my eyes because the first thing that gets to you is that pressure pressure cloud and then i just flew i flew and i remember everything being um kind of like white and smoke and and debris of all sorts flying everywhere and following that the moment of liftoff came the sound because sound travels slower and that was the most horrific sound that i had ever heard it sounded as though something had like murdered the earth and the earth was roaring back of from agony and pain and then light up at some point i was knocked out so whether it was for a minute or two i really don't know in my head i remember being blown away and then falling and i mean i was blown further back um i got up in inside a restaurant which was i think a few like 10 15 meters behind me i had cuts all over my body from glass and i assumed it was either from like while i was in the sky and glass kind of was exploding everywhere or when i was shot back through the the restaurant um just like cuts everywhere i found that in my left foot there was a huge shard of glass that had kind of gone through the bottom um and usually these things like you shouldn't remove them because they kind of become the plug to your body so you don't you know bleed out but my first reaction was like i can't even walk it's bigger than my entire leg so i just pulled it out and i got up and i i went out of the the restaurant and i didn't even i didn't even check to see if anything was was wrong i mean i could move my arms and my legs so i thought i was lucky i mean by the time i got up and i walked out it looked like a like an apocalypse it's a very beautiful little area like all these little restaurants and pubs and everything was destroyed there was rubble everywhere every single glass window whether it was shops or cars or houses whatever everything had had exploded like a railing from balconies were had fallen walls had fallen cars had been destroyed there were the sounds i mean there were there was a lot of visual sound yet i couldn't hear anything um and it was quite uh terrifying this idea of seeing so much sound and seeing people screaming and people talking to me and i couldn't hear anything um so then and i couldn't find i couldn't see my friends as well i couldn't find joe and karim so i just started screaming and i was screaming their names looking for them but i was also screaming hoping that i could i'll hear my voice like the things you see you know like you see these things in movies and you think you'll be okay when you see them in real life but it's not the same um there was a girl who was standing i'd say less than a meter away from me before the blast um and she was also kind of like looking onto the port so i mean essentially we were we would have had the same effect she lost her entire cheek so there was nothing here and you could see like all her teeth and her like cheekbone um there were there was a another woman with her her her cheek from here was just kind of like it was if it was just cut open there was a guy laying on the floor um like i think he was unconscious and he was just covered in blood there was a group of i guess teenagers that were bleeding from top to bottom i mean you can't really tell what the injuries are just because there's blush gushing out everywhere so you can't really tell like what exactly is happening but i mean there was blood everywhere thankfully after a few minutes i hear like a faint uh scream and it's essentially it was kareem screaming for my name so i saw him and i ran to him and then when we finally see joe um joe had his t-shirt off and he was holding it against his forehead and we kind of like ran to him and were like what's wrong and he removes his shirt and there's a huge cavity like a huge hole in his forehead so we're trying to look for our stuff i was trying to find my phone and we couldn't find joe's phone uh we couldn't find any of our stuff and that's when kadeem who had his phone as we were looking just grabbed his phone and took a six second video [Music] you can see me in the video and you can see joe as well at that point as we were looking um joe khanna started to like feel a bit dizzy and and uncomfortable and he had to sit down and he started to like kind of close his eyes so i like up until now it was like what happened to us what's happening what are we gonna do where are we gonna go to i think joe's gonna die and we can't let him die so i looked at kareem and i said we need to get out of here now like that's it forget everything else let's just go i remember telling kadeem you take joe and go walk up the street so in the opposite direction and kind of start making your way downtown and kind of like in this other side of beirut which is just like a few minutes away there are like all the big hospitals all the university hospitals and stuff the medical centers so we decided that we're going to make that journey we're going to make the trip from within madame all the way to downtown to um monitor square is what it's called and that was a horror movie just walking through that street was a horror movie i mean anything that you could possibly imagine in terms of um injuries people like hanging from balconies like just sitting in like blood everywhere children like limbs missing arms legs throughout that entire street it was taking turns carrying joe and then trying to help people like lifting stuff off of people just anything you can do all this time joe was kind of falling in and out of consciousness so i mean his eyes were closed at this point and his face kind of started to fill with blood because so he broke all the bones in his face so like it was trying to get like blue and purple and and red um and and we were taking turns like kind of trying to wake him up and make sure he stays up and he stays with us so we finally make our way and we get down to this open area and we kind of look around to see if there are any roads that are leading to the other side of town and uh far down by one road we see that there are like the road is open cars aren't like destroyed there like you can drive so i get down there it's mayhem like it's chaos it's like apocalypse scenes like huge tall buildings were destroyed i remember seeing this one big building destroyed and it really shook me like this is how bad it is um and i was jumping in front of any and all cars trying to get someone to to take us um i mean people were like losing their minds no one was kind of like responding people just didn't know what to do and we're kind of driving manically everywhere um until this one guy i jumped in front of his car and i mean i'm pretty sure he must have freaked out like i was like covered in blood and joe and kareem were coming and i said like dude like you have to take us to the hospital please like you have to have to take us um and he was kind enough to he was just like yeah like get in and this poor guy uh christian like i don't know never met him in life he was just nice guy we got in the car and he started driving he he i think he hit his car like 20 30 times on our way there he hit like all kinds of stuff on the way luckily we got to one of the hospitals and i remember right as we were getting out of the car i was like like are you fine is your family fine he's and he's like i can't find my fiance and i was like good luck man like thanks for thanks for dropping us so we get like one of the doctors we're like please like you need to help us like he he's not okay he's like barely responding he's lost so much blood he has like a huge hole in his head um so she kind of turns her attention to him and they put him on a wheelchair and everything they were operating on people like left and right on the grounds on tabletops and everywhere and i mean they were asking help from everyone anyone who could help would help so while that other doctor and karim were tending to joe i kind of was doing anything and everything that the other doctor was telling me to do and this girl came in and she kind of had like a patch over her eye like a gauze or something and i kind of like seated her somewhere i'm like alright you sit here and she's like can you just can you see if my eye is fine because i can see with this one but i can't see anything with this one and she took off that that gauze and there was nothing there was no eye um and i was like well can you see me with the size she's like i can see you perfectly i'm like that's all you need to worry about like you're you're good and here i think i kind of switched into this little like a bit of a more positive kind of outlook because i mean people were coming into this room thinking they're either gonna die or or someone died and it was it was very intense at one point they told us that joe needs to do a ct scan so they we need to take him to the upper floors as they took him in joe's father called joe's phone um and akaram had told him where we were so i was like all right i'll go you know figure this out you guys take joe in and uh and get him so i pick up and uh joe's dad is like we're here we're in at the hospital but basically they managed to get joe in they had to like pin him down to do the ct because he wouldn't stop moving um he was fine they got him out his dad kind of just threw some gloves on and helped staple his his head um and they took him up to like a room and he was he was stable he was okay yeah like just just seeing that everyone was fine that's when i was like i was alright because uh the the worst thing for me that i kept thinking about is i'm not gonna have that conversation with joe's parents where i have to apologize for not making it on time so thankfully he's all good we went home and the guys kind of just like got tweezers and were like picking glass out of our like kiddim and eyes like heads and backs and everything in our and um yeah we like showered got some food and i actually went back to right where the explosion happened um that same night looking for like my stuff and the guy's stuff and trying to kind of just ground what the [ __ ] had just happened went back didn't find anything except this watch so my watch survived and uh yeah that's it was that an emotional moment going back to the place where you were when it happened surprisingly no um i was actually a lot of anger at that point like rumors had started to come out about what had happened nothing was like confirmed yet but uh the incompetence of the lebanese government definitely like was starting to show more and more like no one no one should ever ever have to experience or live anything like that so what did you do after the last and then in a few months after it so in the in the weeks after the blast we spent our days um with joe in the hospital and on the streets like cleaning up the streets and building the houses because our government is incompetent and uh they didn't do anything so it really was like the power to the people and um everyone was just in the streets helping cleaning we were like getting donations and distributing like food resources um yeah and just helping people and volunteering with all the efforts that were on the ground i mean 300 000 people were displaced 6 000 injured 200 plus dead so people needed help kind of a little silver lining of kovid like people were at home it was like kind of a lockdown in general like people weren't going out that much although it was the summer and things were kind of loosened up but still like had it been in normal times we'd be talking like thousands of casualties not just hundreds has anyone been held account for the explosion until this day justice hasn't been served no one's been held accountable and every attempt to try to open investigations and to seek to get um like permission to hold different government like political entities accountable are always either like stopped or people are threatened um no path to justice yet no one no one has been held accountable and and joe high high is joe and i joe's awesome he's much better i mean he he is almost at full recovery but he's resumed like his normal life and everything's all right um but yeah actually i spoke to them before coming and uh it was actually the first time that we speak about it in terms of like the sequence of events and what happened and uh yeah it's just insane to to remember that we went through that and how are you doing now there's a lot of guilt um like survival for survivor's guilt because i mean that girl she was standing right next to me and her face got like totally destroyed and i was right next to her and i'm i'm fine um even in terms of joe i mean i was closer like why him i feel like if i was standing a meter to the left or to the right like i wouldn't be here right now i don't know how do you go through something like that without uh i mean i used to carry my first aid kit around everywhere now i carry like three i have one in my bag now um [Music] and you're just always like kind of prepared and ready i mean there's like the unfortunate lessons of expecting the worst at any moment but it also you walk away from these things and like the silver lining is you know that you're capable and that you can sustain kind of these things and yeah i mean you walk away with some sort of pride that realistically you did the best you could [Music] so [Music] they are all muscle operated so there are actually no wires or anything attached you literally just slip your arm in and as soon as i'm in there i can move the fingers so if i flex my muscles the hand will open and if i squeeze my muscles the hand will close

Channel: LADbible TV

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Rating: 4.9658723 out of 5

Keywords: the lad bible, lad bible, lad, bible, videos, viral videos, viral, funny, comedy, funny videos, documentaries, exclusives, interviews, beirut explosion reaction, beirut explosion all angles, beirut explosion documentary, beirut blast, beirut blast footage, beirut blast survivor, beirut blast cause, fadi, bros beirut, beirut anniversary, lebanon explosion, documentary lebanon, viral video, aljazeera live, middle east, lebanon explosion 2020, ammonium nitrate, middle east history

Id: a1vRzOffSYk

Length: 20min 32sec (1232 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Daldain]

Hard to imagine, great recap on what he went through.