Dozens Dead, Thousands Wounded in Beirut Explosion; At least 78 Killed in Massive Explosion in Beirut; Beirut Marks Day of Mourning after Tuesday's Deadly Blast.
ROBYN CURNOW, CNN ANCHOR: Well, thanks so much for joining us. You are watching CNN. I'm Robyn Curnow, live from here CNN's World News headquarters in Atlanta. And, of course, Beirut was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. Today the city's governor says it reminds him more of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. This huge explosion ripped through the port in Lebanon's capital killing at least 78 people, wounding 4,000 others. But, with many, many still people -- many, many people still missing and hospitals overwhelmed. Those numbers are certain to rise. Now, the prime minister is pointing to a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate as the likely cause of the blast. He's also declared it a national day of mourning and is promising a thorough investigation.</s>HASSAN DIAB, LEBANESE PRIME MINISTER (through translator): What happened today will not pass without accountability. Those responsible will pay the price for this catastrophe. Facts will be announced about this dangerous warehouse, which has been present since 2014 for six years. I will not preempt the investigations. The time now is for dealing with this catastrophe.</s>CURNOW: So, CNN's Ben Wedeman was in CNN's Beirut Bureau on Tuesday evening when this explosion happened. Ben?</s>BEN WEDEMAN, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: It felt like an earthquake and it looked like a mushroom cloud. The explosion in Beirut Tuesday so massive it shook the ground all the way to Cypress, 150 miles away. The level of devastation is still being accessed, with widespread destruction stretching for miles from the epicenter near Beirut's port. Firefighters and emergency workers rushed to the scene, one that the city's governor, Marwan Abboud described as resembling Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Local hospitals were immediately inundated with hundreds of victims and the Lebanese Red Cross put out an urgent call for blood donations. The casualty count staggering. Thousands injured and dozens dead, with the number of dead surely to rise in the hours to come. Initially the state news agency attributed the cause of the blast to a fire at a fireworks warehouse, but shortly afterwards the head of Lebanese security said the explosion happened at the site of confiscated high explosive materials. Lebanon's Prime Minister Hassan Diab later said it is unacceptable that a shipment of an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was stored in a warehouse near the port for six years, that as the country launched an investigation into the cause, expecting an initial report in the coming days. The Lebanese president has ordered military patrols in the wake of the incident, in a country already on its knees due to a failing economy and the spread of COVID-19. The Lebanese Prime Minister has announced that Wednesday will be a day of mourning. Ben Wedeman, CNN, Beirut.</s>CURNOW: Well, Tuesday's blast was so, so powerful it actually registered as a 3.3 magnitude earthquake and the damage could to the port could mean food shortages also for the entire nation. Seventy percent of Lebanon's food is imported through that harbor. And a silo that holds the countries largest wheat stockpile has been destroyed as well. Witnesses describing what they saw.</s>PHILIPE ARACTINGI, FILM DIRECTOR: I've seen war, I've filmed war. I went to (inaudible) in 2006, I went to the South Lebanon to see this. It took 30 days to do the same destruction, we had it in one explosion. It is a catastrophe. I've never seen something like that.</s>KARL DAGHER, WITNESS AND PROCUREMENT ENGINEER: Honestly, we were just sifting through the rumors, hearing all the rumors and trying to understand what happened, because there was lots of confusion and lots of rage that this could happen, with everything that's happening in the country, they're not -- the cherry on top, there comes massive negligence or we don't what is -- or an actor of terror, we really don't understand. But, it's just -- and on top of all that you have to worry about wearing your face mask because you don't want to get coronavirus in the hospital for treating a small wound. So, I think outrage would be the correct word to express what I'm feeling right now.</s>CURNOW: Jomana Karadsheh is following these developments from Istanbul, Turkey. He speaks of outrage, but also people devastated. It's morning there and we're getting a better sense of the blast radius and it's -- it's inconceivable isn't it?</s>JOMANA KARDSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It's just unfathomable, Robyn. The -- the scale of the destruction that we are seeing following this incident, you know. It stretches miles and miles across Beirut, you know, almost everyone you talk to, pretty much everyone has been impacted by this blast. You're talking about buildings destroyed, entire streets wiped and we still don't really know the true human toll of this incident. You know, the government's talking about more than 70 people who have been confirmed killed, more than 4,000 people who have been injured, but there are so many people who are still unaccounted for. It is a very truly heartbreaking situation. When you see people searching for their loved ones, frantically searching at hospitals that have been overwhelmed, you know, but this situation. Also, taking to social media, posting photo, phone numbers, searching for their loved ones. The charity Save the Children, saying that there are children unaccounted for. So, you know, when people wake up this morning, this is a city that is still dealing with the trauma of an event like this, Beirut has seen so much over the years. It has seen everything, but it has seen nothing like this, Robyn. By all accounts, people who lived through the Civil War, they have lived through various wars, terror attacks, assassinations and bombings in Beirut, they have seen nothing like this.</s>CURNOW: Jomana, thanks so much. Jomana Karadsheh in Istanbul with that report. So, U.S. Defense officials are contradicting and assertion (ph) by the President Donald Trump that the Beirut explosion was actually a bombing. And unnamed sources says there's no indication of that, but here's what the president said.</s>UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You called this an attack. Are you confident that this was an attack and not an accident?</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, it would seem like it based on the explosion. I've met with some of our great generals and they just seem to feel that it was. This was not a -- some kind of a manufacturing explosion type of an event. This was a -- seems to be, according to them, they would know better than I would, but they seem to think it was a attack, it was a bomb of some kind.</s>CURNOW: Well, Lebanese officials have not called the explosion an attack. President Trump did offer U.S. assistance and his deepest sympathies to the Lebanese people. Well let's go now to Jad Chaaban, he's in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. He's an Associate Professor of Economics at the American University of Beirut. How are you doing, sir? I understand that many people actually heard this blast where you are. Did you hear it?</s>JAD CHAABAN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF BEIRUT: Good morning.</s>CURNOW: Hi.</s>CHAABAN: Yes, I was in Beirut and my family in the mountains here in the Bekaa. I heard it very loud, it was like an earthquake in Beirut where I live and I'm like 10 kilometers from the port. And in the Bekaa Valley where my family is, they also heard it, which is 60 kilometers away from Beirut. And the people as far as Cypress also heard it. You know, Cypress is 130 kilometers also from the port.</s>CURNOW: We heard there -- one -- a Lebanese gentleman saying that he's outraged and Jomana Karadsheh, our correspondent outlying Lebanon's pretty tumultuous history. But this just seems to defy any explanation. What is the mood of the country right now?</s>CHAABAN: You know, this is beyond a national disaster, Beirut city is completely destroyed and shattered. There are more than 80 people killed, 4,000 wounded and hundreds who are still missing. For me as a Lebanese citizen this is a criminal attack by this ruling state, but these ruling parties and all their friends in power against us. They have committed a crime by storing these nitrates for more than a decade there with no accountability. People for lesser crimes, they just leave their posts and people now are angry, we are very, very angry against this political class and -- and they all should leave.</s>CURNOW: Do you think there will be a political explosion to follow this one?</s>CHAABAN: I am sure about that. I'm -- I'm -- you know, when October 17 demonstrations and the revolution started, it was on the backdrop of forest fires and corruption and the kind of mini scandals (ph) compared to what happened yesterday. What happened yesterday is a -- is a national disaster and murder from this political class, because they knew what they were storing there. There were reports that everyone on -- to the top of the echelon, they knew that the nitrates and these explosive, 2,700 tons of explosive. The Oklahoma bombing in 1995 was only four tons, we had 2,700 tons stored there, zero accountability. Everyone knew what was there and nobody budged to do anything about it. And people are saying already, all over social media, on the streets, everywhere, they want revenge.</s>CURNOW: How -- how can that be followed through, because it has been such a tumultuous time? People are, in many ways, struggling with daily life, with COVID, with the economy. You know, is there just an exhaustion here or do you think this has lit some sort of fire that can defy all of that?</s>CHAABAN: You know, people now woke up to their destroyed homes, to shattered glass, destroyed trucks and cars. They have no dollars because the banks have blocked their dollar accounts to pay for any imports. Prices have more than quadrupled in the past few months, so nobody can afford really to build anything. There is exacerbation on the street and there is a lot of anger. And I'm sure this anger will materialize into at least a toppling of this, you know, ruling heads from the president to the prime minister, to the head of parliament, there should be an emergency government to take over a transitional period and all of this political class should just leave. They committed slow crimes by cutting our electricity, by corruption, by destroying our economy and engaging into futile wars all over the region and even in Lebanon. This is like, you know, the cherry on top. That's it. This is too much to bear. Beirut will not come back, with this many years to be -- be reconstructed. You've seen pictures of the port where we important through that port 80 percent of all our local consumption. This is a national disaster of -- of scale that -- you know -- I've -- I'm 42-years-old, I've lived through wars in Lebanon, through the July War, through the Hariri assassination. I have never seen anything like that.</s>CURNOW: No, it is unfathomable and it's difficult to -- to explain it, even from the video that we're seeing early this morning. One of our experts described it as the equivalent of a kiloton nuclear bomb going off. That it wasn't a nuclear bomb, but it's the equivalent in terms of the blast. And these are the images we've been seeing this morning. So, no windows, no electricity, a city almost broken and devastated. Is anyone coming to help? Are -- you know -- do -- does Lebanon feel like the international communities also perhaps abandoning them, because has there been enough offers of support?</s>CHAABAN: You know, I've -- we've read offers of support from European countries, from the U.S., from Gulf countries, from several countries --</s>CURNOW: What do you need? What do you want?</s>CHAABAN: I mean, (inaudible) support, definitely field hospitals, medical supplies, but you know what we really need is -- is access to soft loans and grants, specifically in dollars for people and companies to rebuild. Now remember, I mean, this blast comes on top of an economic crisis, where we don't have access to any currency to buy our imports before. So, imagine right now the truck owners that had their trucks stored in the port, hundreds of trucks destroyed. How can they buy new trucks? They don't have money for that. They need soft loans, microcredits, provided immediately for them to -- and grants to -- to buy their equipment again, to restart the economy. We need SMEs loans and support for the small enterprises, you know, the vibrant scene that was still trying to survive around the port area, where you had a very nice neighborhood, all of them destroyed, historical neighborhoods with restaurants and shops. All of these need rebuilding. We didn't have money in the first place, because the money was stolen by these -- (inaudible) in power. And now we actually need immediate humanitarian, but also economic and financial support. Regardless of what people think about this government, its political allegiance is, don't through this government, go through the U.N. system and -- and -- and help the Lebanese people. We -- we need help immediately to survive and to, you know, think about our children, about their future.</s>CURNOW: A call for help, Jad Chaaban, I appreciate you speaking to us. Good luck. A devastating morning to wake up to. But, thank you for speaking to us here</s>CNN. CHAABAN: Thank you. Of course.</s>CURNOW: We have much more ahead on this explosion. We'll hear from someone who lives near the port and describes what it was like when that blast happened. Also, schools across Bolivia will remain empty for the rest of the year as the government there takes drastic action to contain the coronavirus.