A woman in her twenties stood screaming at security forces, asking about the fate of her brother, a port employee.

“His name is Jad, his eyes are green,” she pleaded, to no avail as security forces would not let her enter.

Nearby another woman almost fainted while also asking about her brother who worked at the port.

Ambulance sirens rang throughout the area as vehicles ferried the dead out for at least three hours and fire trucks rushed in and out of the blast zone.

Inside the port itself, the hangars looked like charred cans, everything destroyed beyond recognition as firefighting helicopters flew overhead, dumping water.

02:05

Twin explosions in Beirut kill at least 73 people and injure thousands

Twin explosions in Beirut kill at least 73 people and injure thousands

Abandoned luggage was strewn across the area. Next to one untouched bag lay an unattended corpse.

Every parked vehicle within a radius of several hundred metres sustained damage from the blasts, so big that it was felt in Cyprus, 240km (150 miles) away.

The cars closest to the site of the explosion were reduced to scrapyard metal, their wailing alarms and flashing lights adding to the chaos.

Exhausted firefighters rushed to the scene, some searching for colleagues sent in earlier to put out the initial fire that was raging before the second bigger explosion shook the city.

With the help of the security forces, civil defence teams scoured the area for corpses, as officers screamed at reporters who were trying to document the disaster.

“What are you taking pictures of? There are corpses everywhere,” said one of them.

Members of the security forces broke down in tears when one of their colleagues was brought to them dead on a stretcher.

A fellow police officer pulled out a picture of the deceased with his fiancée, as his comrades wept.

A ship anchored off the port was ablaze from the mushroom of fire, causing panic among the authorities fearing the fuel on-board would trigger another tragedy.

Sitting on a sidewalk near the site of the blasts, at least 10 crew members of two cargo ships damaged in the explosion were waiting to be treated by doctors.

“The ship is sinking in the water, the explosion caused an opening in it, and there are serious injuries on board,” said an Egyptian member of the crew of one of the ships, Mero Star.

“We heard firecrackers and we saw smoke coming out of a warehouse … and after a few minutes the explosion happened,” said another crew member, who asked not be named.

Syrian and Egyptian crew had arrived at the port on Tuesday on board a ship carrying cargo from Ukraine, and many were planning to head back home on Tuesday.

“From the day we set sail six months ago, we had been looking forward to this day of homecoming,” said one Syrian seafarer.

Another Egyptian crew member said he was planning to go back home on Wednesday after months at sea.

“But I will not be able to,” he said. “I don’t know what to do.”

It was the most powerful explosion ever seen in the city, which was on the front lines of the 1975-1990 civil war and has endured conflicts with neighbouring Israel and periodic bombings and terror attacks.

The size and scale of the Beirut explosion mirrored that of another major disaster involving ammonium nitrate. In 1947, a ship carrying some 2,200 tonnes of the chemical compound caught fire in Texas City, Texas, and exploded, causing a series of subsequent blasts at nearby oil facilities and a chemical plant. That disaster killed over 575 people and wounded another 4,000.

“L’Apocalypse,” read the front page of Lebanon’s French L’Orient Le Jour newspaper. Another paper, al-Akhbar, had a photo of a destroyed port with the words: “The Great Collapse”.

Lebanon was already on the brink of collapse amid a severe economic crisis that has ignited mass protests in recent months. Its hospitals are confronting a surge in coronavirus cases, and there were concerns the virus could spread further as people flooded into hospitals.

Additional reporting by Associated Press