Posted by Naharnet
Oil slicks as wide as 300 meters have appeared in the waters of the northern coastal town of Anfeh, media reports said Thursday, drawing condemnation by local fishermen.
Oil Spill Threatens North Lebanese Coast
Political rivalries prevent clean-up of toxic rubbish dump
source IRN At least one person is looking forward to the next time Lebanon’s “rubbish mountain” collapses into the sea.”I am hoping it might collapse so I can find more aluminium,” said Mohammed Mawad, standing amid the toxic chaos of the four-storey high, 600,000 cubic metres of garbage, soil, concrete debris, hospital waste and occasional dead animal. “I have been scavenging like this for copper and aluminium for a year now,” said the former construction worker, as a wave broke and dragged more plastic bags out to the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean. “I can earn an average of LL100,000 (US$68) a day. That’s more than I would make working in the city.” Mawad’s fondness for the rubbish mountain is not widely shared by residents of Lebanon’s southern port city of Sidon, on the outskirts of which the huge garbage dump stands, right on the edge of the sea. Toxic blight Established in 1975 as a temporary municipal tip, the rubbish mountain has grown over three decades of civil war, invasion and government neglect to become an open air dump for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of refuse from homes, factories, hospitals and slaughter houses, as well as debris from buildings destroyed in the 1982 Israeli invasion.