Daylight Wednesday exposed the complete devastation wrought by a colossal explosion in Beirut — Lebanon's capital — less than 24 hours earlier.
Aerial video showed the city ravaged — large buildings flattened and debris-covered streets lined with crushed cars.
At least 100 people were killed and 4,000 more were injured, George Kettana, secretary-general of the Lebanese Red Cross, told LBCI, a local broadcaster, on Wednesday. The numbers were likely to rise as hospitals were packed and rescue workers continued to dig through the rubble.
"There is no word to describe the horror of the catastrophe that occurred in Beirut yesterday," Lebanese President Michel Aoun said during an emergency Cabinet meeting Wednesday, the Lebanese News Agency reported.
Aoun thanked emergency workers and officials and vowed to conduct a full investigation into why a warehouse storing an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate at a shipping port exploded, as the cause is still unclear.
The governor of Beirut, Marwan Abboud, said Wednesday that the cost of the damage to the capital, already under economic pressure, could be $3 billion to $5 billion, adding that the explosion had made at least 200,000 people homeless.
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At a White House briefing Tuesday, President Donald Trump said the explosion looked "like a terrible attack," although he offered no evidence and said later that the conclusion was based on the presumptions of U.S. generals.
The blast was so big that it could be felt and heard throughout much of the city and as far away as the island of Cyprus — about 145 miles away.
