Lebanon dam plan over seismic fault line stirs fears
BISRI: Lebanon’s government says a dam planned for a valley near Beirut is vital to tackle chronic water shortages, but the location on a seismic fault line has raised fears among residents.
“How can you build a dam in an earthquake zone? We don’t even have houses that are earthquakeproof,” said Amer Meshmushi, a resident of Bisri Valley, 35 km south of Beirut.
He grew up hearing about the last major earthquake on the Roum fault, in 1956, which killed 135 people and damaged thousands of houses including his family home in Basaba village.
“My brother was still little, and they had to drag him out from under the rubble,” the 50-year-old recalled his parents telling him as a child.
Lebanon’s government and the World Bank say the Bisri dam is desperately needed to address water shortages afflicting greater Beirut’s 1.6 million residents.
They insist the structure will be safe and say measures will be taken to mitigate seismic risks.
But Meshmushi’s concerns are shared by local activists, including Raja Noujaim, head of the Association for the Protection of the Lebanese Heritage.
“When we look at the region’s history and geography, we see that all of its valleys are the result of the fact that it is a seismic zone,” he told AFP.
Activists say an earthquake could cause the dam to burst and that the structure and its reservoir would put pressure on the fault line and increase seismic activity.
The World Bank and Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), a government agency that supervises major infrastructure projects, identified the valley as a prime location for a dam thanks to its abundant water, wide basin and proximity to Beirut.
In a report, the World Bank said a panel of four “internationally recognized experts” recruited by the CDR had reviewed safety studies, adding that the dam’s design was “consistent with international best practice.”
The World Bank told AFP that tests showed the dam had “a resistance to shocks above the one provoked by the 1956 earthquake,” which measured a six on the Richter scale — similar to the strength of the quakes that devastated central Italy last year.
Eli Mussali, the CDR engineer overseeing the project, said the dam could “withstand earthquakes up to eight on the Richter scale, which is a very high degree.”
He also downplayed the possibility that the structure could provoke seismic activity, saying there was no evidence for such a phenomenon.