I bet the above pictures look familiar. You saw them happening yesterday, didn’t you? Beirut’s airport being flooded, the tunnel leading to the airport being flooded and trapping cars for hours, etc…
Except the above pictures are not actually footage from yesterday’s Lebanese apocalypse. They are the same pictures I posted on this blog in 2012, around the same time of the year, when Lebanon had its first rainstorm of the season. Here’s the link (click) if you don’t believe me. And they happened again in 2013, and again yesterday.
It’s the same story every year. Whenever those dark grey clouds gather and those raindrops indicating the summer-long drought will soon be over, everyone and their mother is absolutely taken aback by how horribly our roads and infrastructure handles the year’s first downpour.
It’s akin to our ministry of public affairs and the various municipalities around the country being like the blue fish in Finding Nemo: no short term memory whatsoever. Every single year, they are absolutely dumfounded that their jurisdiction is nowhere near equipped to handle a few millimeters of rain. A state of utter shock ensues. It rained? In November? Oh my god, it can’t be!
I wonder: how much resources would it take the ministry in question to make sure the gutters are clean, the roads are equipped and that the country wouldn’t be in near-apocalypse mode when it rains?
Perhaps the energy that goes into the thought process in question is too much and too unnecessary. This is what happened in Lebanon yesterday:
- It rained,
- The airport’s road got inundated,
- The tunnel leading up to the airport road got flooded,
- Horrible traffic ensued,
- Water piled up to 0.5 meters in certain areas, flooding houses. It wasn’t a monsoon,
- Electricité Du Liban’s generators got disconnected off the grid, leaving the country in electrical blackout,
- News surfaced that City Centre was closing down due to the electricity cut. This was later denied.
- Cinema Abraj in Furn El Shebbak was flooded (check picture below), in what looks like a typical Hollywood movie that cinema was probably screening at the time.
The following are pictures that took place yesterday:
On the bright side, we can now say the four month drought in Beirut is officially over.
We live in a country that cannot handle two hours of rain, and some think we are equipped to handle the graver issues facing our great Lebanese nation of eternal beauty. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Ladies and gentlemen, how about several pictures, two years apart, that are exactly the same in content?
Welcome to the country of utter and absolute corruption regarding which you can’t do anything. And if you thought that this year would end up in a lesson to our government to pull it together and prevent floods in 2015, you thought wrong. As they say: فالج لا تعالج. The following is a picture of Lebanon’s first rain in 1965:
Filed under: Lebanon
