A black coat of oil now covers the Lebanese capital’s once-beautiful sandy Mediterranean shore, spilled from a power plant that was knocked down by Israeli warplanes last month.
About 80 miles of Lebanon’s shores have been affected by a spill of more than 110,000 barrels of oil from the Jiyeh plant, about 12 miles south of Beirut, according to the city’s mayor, Abdel Monem Ariss. The plant was in flames after it was hit in Israeli air raids, cutting electricity to many areas in the capital and south Lebanon.
Ariss said it appeared other factors also contributed to the environmental disaster — a leak from an Egyptian commercial boat that was apparently hit by a Hezbollah missile off Beirut, another from an Israeli gunboat also hit by Hezbollah, as well as effluent from a cement factory in northern Lebanon that was attacked by Israeli forces.
Lebanon, whose flag features a cedar tree and which is known by many as Green Lebanon for its forested mountains, is one of the few countries in the Arab world that pays attention to pollution. Minibuses that run on diesel have been banned, while factories are forced to abide by strict rules.
Now, large parts of the country’s sandy and rocky beaches, visited in the past by hundreds of thousands of tourists each year, are covered with thick black oil. Many fishermen have been forced out of business, and people are afraid to eat any fish at all.
“The black tide on the Lebanese and Syrian coasts exposes people in the stricken areas to a risk of cancer,” from both direct exposure and food contamination, said Sergio Illuminato, director of INFO/RAC, an agency working with the U.N. Environment Program.
Compounding the problem was an Israeli naval blockade and continuing military operations that made any cleanup impossible. And environmental officials warned that the longer the problem was allowed to go unchecked, the greater the lasting damage.
The first country to rush help to Lebanon was Kuwait, which suffered a similar disaster during the 1991 Gulf War. But three truckloads of cleanup supplies the country sent became stuck in Beirut, with crews waiting for the fighting to wane before beginning work, Ariss said.
“We have no access to Lebanon territorial waters,” said Yaacoub Sarraf, the Lebanese environment minister, shortly after the spill. “This means that we are already 10 days delayed and in terms of oil pollution, 10 days is a century.”
Sarraf estimated it would cost $30 million to $50 million to clean up the shorelines, and possibly 10 times that much for the entire effort. Optimistic assessments suggest it could take at least six months for the shore cleanup and up to 10 years for “the reestablishment of the ecosystem of the eastern Mediterranean,” he said.
Fisherman Salim Yazmanji, 32, said as many as 100 fish can wash up on every 30-foot stretch of the beach and that he had lost his livelihood.
“I have nothing but the sea,” Yazmanji said. “If you take the sea from a fisherman, he will die, like the fish.”