Lebanon’s water line could collapse in a month: Official
A loss of access to the public water supply could force households to make extremely difficult decisions regarding their basic water, sanitation and hygiene needs, says Unicef’s representative
The shortages and currency crunch in Lebanon could lead to a collapse of the mains water supply in Lebanon within a month, the UN’S Children Fund warned on Friday.
“More than four million people, including one million refugees, are at immediate risk of losing access to safe water in Lebanon,” Unicef said.
The UN agency said that maintenance costs incurred in US dollars, funding shortages and the parallel collapse of the power grid were rapidly destroying the water sector.
“Unicef estimates that most water pumping will gradually cease across the country in the next four to six weeks,” it said.
“A loss of access to the public water supply could force households to make extremely difficult decisions regarding their basic water, sanitation and hygiene needs,” Unicef Representative in Lebanon Yukie Mokuo said.
Lebanon’s meltdown, which started with a financial crisis caused by state corruption and mismanagement, is fast spreading to every aspect of daily life.
The Lebanese pound, which for years was pegged to the US dollar, has lost more than 90 per cent of its value over the past 18 months.
Electricity in most places is barely available an hour a day while the fuel needed to power generators is also in short supply.
Hospitals in crisis-hit Lebanon on Thursday warned of a looming “catastrophe” as some were only hours away from running out of fuel to keep life-saving equipment on during endless state power cuts.
Lebanon’s worst financial and economic crisis ever is batering an already fragile health sector as it faces the latest wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
The state electricity supplier has all but stopped supplying power in recent weeks, forcing homes, businesses and hospitals to rely on backup generators almost around the clock.
But the syndicate of private hospitals on Thursday warned they were struggling to procure enough fuel to keep theirs on.
“Hospitals are unable to find fuel oil to power generators during power outages of at least 20 hours a day,” it said in a statement.
“A number of hospitals risk running out in coming hours, which will put the lives of patients in danger,” it warned, without specifying how many facilities were at immediate risk.
The syndicate called on officials to “immediately work to solve the issue to avoid a health catastrophe.”
As foreign reserves plummet, the Lebanese state is struggling to buy fuel for its power plants, increasing electricity cuts to up to 23 hours a day in some parts of the country.
The crisis has caused the local currency to lose more than 90 per cent of its value, and forced hundreds of thousands of Lebanese with drastically reduced incomes to contend with shortages.
Earlier this month, medicine importers said they had run out of hundreds of essential drugs because the central bank had not released the promised dollars to pay suppliers abroad.
Families in Lebanon are now spending five times the minimum wage on food alone, a report found on Wednesday, as inflation caused by the country’s worst-ever economic crisis continues to soar.
The Mediterranean country is batling what the World Bank has described as one of the planet’s worst financial crises since the 1850s, which has let more than half the population living below the poverty line.
According to the latest prices in July, “a family’s budget just for food is around five times the minimum wage,” the Crisis Observatory at the American University of Beirut ( AUB) said.
The vast majority of families in Lebanon would soon find it difficult to put the minimum amount of food on the table without help from relatives or humanitarian aid, it said.
Without taking into account the additional cost of water, electricity or cooking gas, a family of five was spending more than 3.5 million Lebanese pounds a month on food alone, the Observatory estimated.
Most people are paid in the local currency in Lebanon, where the national minimum wage stands at 675,000 Lebanese pounds.