Highland surgeon Andy Kent reports on mercy mission after devastating Beirut explosion
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In the aftermath of the devastating explosion which rocked the city of Beirut, consultant orthopaedic and trauma surgeon Andy Kent, normally to be found at Raigmore Hospital, details his part in a mercy mission to the stricken city and what he found there.
Like many people around the world, I watched in awe as a massive explosion ripped the heart out of the port area of Beirut on the evening of August 4.
Although I had never previously visited Lebanon, I have travelled and worked extensively in the Middle East.
In 2017, I spent two months in Mosul, Iraq, supporting local surgeons to manage civilian trauma cases caused by terrorist and coalition bombing in a hospital sponsored by the World Health Organisation. I also served with UK forces in both Gulf Wars and understood immediately the devastation and pattern of casualties that would have resulted.
Later that evening, I was approached by UK-Med to join a medical assessment team to travel to Beirut and provide an immediate “on-the-ground” medical needs assessment on behalf of the UK government.
On Friday, August 9 I flew from Heathrow to Beirut as surgical lead with four team members from UK- Med and Humanity and Inclusion – specialists in humanitarian health, disease outbreak, physiotherapy and rehabilitation and medical logistics.
Over the following six days we travelled extensively around Beirut meeting local healthcare personnel and visiting as many sites as possible.
One of our first visits was, of course, to the blast site itself. Although it was then four days since the blast broken glass and other debris were literally everywhere – most of the modern high-rise offices overlooking the port had been glass-fronted.
Cars had been thrown around on the highway that ran along the esplanade and in the port itself everything was a tangled mess of metal and containers. It was miraculous there were “only” around 200 fatalities. Because the explosion had happened after 6pm the port itself was closed, the highway cleared of rush hour traffic and most of the sea-facing office blocks empty.
One can only imagine the carnage had the explosion happened two hours earlier.
It was amazing to see the civilian-led clean up in operation. Large groups of people – many with obvious injuries – were sweeping up, seemingly ignoring the risk of falling debris whilst international search and rescue teams were still sifting through the rubble for bodies.
Others were providing food and water to anyone who needed it. This level of civic cooperation and resilience was to be a constant feature of our visit – particularly so amongst the medical community.
We visited the Geitaoui Hospital which was a recently refurbished private hospital (over 80 per cent of Lebanon’s healthcare system is privatised). It had previously enjoyed a spectacular vista overlooking the port and Eastern Mediterranean and consequently faced the full force of the blast. We were shown around this devastated building by a clearly shell-shocked senior surgeon, Dr Joseph Khalil.
He described to us in graphic detail the chaos and carnage of that night four days previously. I don’t think he had had much sleep since.
In all the hospital facilities we visited over the following days we encountered the same scenarios and heard similar heart-wrenching accounts of how systems were stretched far beyond capacity.
Hospitals in Beirut are used to tragedies and train regularly for mass-casualty events, however no one trains for 6000 casualties in one night and I honestly can’t imagine any city in the world that could have coped better than here in Beirut.
As a trauma surgeon, I had expected to see a typical distribution and pattern of injuries (such as burns, major limb trauma etc), but this was very different and most of the casualties were either caused by the shock wave itself or the effects of glass fragments – multiple deep lacerations to the extremities and face.
Many of these lacerations were rapidly sutured over the following day or two and around 80 per cent of the casualties did not require hospital admission.
It rapidly became clear that there was no requirement to bring additional surgical assets into Lebanon as there are sufficient numbers of highly trained surgical staff in-country to deal with these cases.
As we became better informed about the medical system in Lebanon, it became clear to our team that there was an impending disaster evolving even before the explosion.
The medical system in Lebanon was being stretched by massive immigration (over 1.5 million Syrian refugees have entered the country), financial collapse and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Following our visits, our findings have been fed back to the UK government.
Using our information, they will now decide how best to help our friends in Lebanon.
Related article: Doctor from Raigmore Hospital heads to Beirut to help
