Beirut Explosion Still A Nightmare; Reuters Journalist Suffers Bloodloss While Filming The Same

TV producer of Reuters, Yara Abi Nader was driving her car while the explosion of Beirut took place on 4th of August. The joint explosion in the port area of Beirut has killed over a hundred and injured thousands of which the Reuters headquarters of Beirut was a part. 

Reuters senior television producer Ayat Basma who provided the world with some first pictures of the deadly damage, said, " I was lying on the ground, and all I could hear was the sirens of the car alarms". She has taken a day off on Tuesday. She said she thought to herself as the blast occurred, "I thought, I don't want to die". Then she started filming the whole shocking event from her smartphone with a bleeding forehead and wet hair, and a speedy dressup on the streets. People were left aghast and were running everywhere with bodies of relatives and dead ones or injured ones. She added, "Then the adrenaline kicked in".

Basma was home and it was a blessing, she said. The roof of her adjoining building had blown off. It was a devastating sight all over with an orange and white mushroom cloud ploying towards the sky from a 2750 tonnes ammonium nitrate piled up near the port area that ignited to make the joint explosions. 

Basma further said, "Everything was down, the neighbours were shouting, the kids were crying... All you could hear was sound of cars driving on smashed glass". "But I just kept saying to myself, 'Film and send. Film and send'". Life of journalists are always at stake and the risks are big. This day the Reuters staffs saw it in real.

Senior correspondent Ellen Francis hid under her desk as chunks of the ceiling crashed to the ground of the @Reuters office in Beirut on Tuesday. Read how she and her colleagues managed to escape the destroyed newsroom to cover the port blast https://t.co/VqpfTqeokq pic.twitter.com/7eBZe6kcfE

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 8, 2020