Zainab Hammoud wrote in “Al-Akhbar”:
Yesterday, the people of some Lebanese regions, especially in the capital, Beirut, performed the same “rehearsal” that precedes every winter, specifically with heavy rain falling for the first time. The “flooding” of main and secondary roads due to the fragility of the infrastructure, which forced them to “swim” to cross them, or to wait for hours in their cars stuck in traffic, or to “suffocate” the road.
The Lebanese woke up to a number of roads flooded with large amounts of precipitation and sewage. The precipitation quickly turned into “rivers,” “seas,” and “lakes,” in the words of social media users who took pictures of the “flood” and expressed their dissatisfaction, each in his own way. One of them, for example, mocked the amount of water that filled the narrow alleys of Bir Hassan, commenting: “Prepare the boats, you are in Venice, Italy.” He posted another video clip of a street in Sin El Fil, where water covered the knee of an elderly man, as he pushed it off his shop using a “mop” stick. While a video clip of a car in the middle of the road in the Kuwaiti embassy area, buried in water and piles of waste, and cars parked on the side of the road that did not know how to get out of the “quagmire” in which they were stuck, was widely spread on social networking sites.
The flood of roads coincided with students heading to their schools and universities, and people going to work in the morning, so the matter became more complicated. In the Al-Rehab neighborhood in Ghobeiry, students “stumbled” to cross the “swamp” towards their schools with as little “wetting” as possible. Nour quickly walked “without escaping the waterfalls that threw water and dirt on me, until I arrived at school with a large part of my pants oozing water.” Some students pulled up their pants and others went home. When Muhammad left his home in the Al-Salam neighborhood, “I was terrified of what awaited me in terms of a watery motorcycle trip to the institute,” he recounted what happened to him with great enthusiasm: “By God, the water reached the middle of my feet while I was riding my bike on Sayyed Hadi Highway in the southern suburb.”
The employees breathed a sigh of relief until they found transportation to take them to work. Sanaa, for example, waited about half an hour until she found a taxi to Salim Salam “because the rain was pouring heavily and its level was rising on the ground, so the drivers parked their cars aside, which increased my anxiety about always being late.” Most of the employees in Beirut arrived late to work due to traffic jams in various areas, which the Traffic Control Room in turn inspected since eight in the morning, reporting heavy traffic movements from Dbayeh towards Jal El Dib to Karantina, and from Sin El Fil Boulevard towards Saloumi, and from Khaldeh towards the airport tunnel. And from Tabarja towards Jounieh to Zouk Mikael, and at the Al-Kula Bridge and Al-Ouzai Highway towards Al-Jannah…
The closure of roads, the restriction of traffic on some of them to one line, and the occurrence of traffic accidents, all of which prompted people to change their route. Manal changed her route four times, “particularly the moment we were surprised by a traffic accident in the ward, as Regar entered the wheel of a car, obstructing its movement, causing the entire road to be closed, in addition to a collision between two cars on the opposite side.” Leah’s journey from Aramoun to Hamra took an hour and a quarter of traffic, “nervousness, and worry about my small car drowning in the flood,” after her journey might have taken half an hour or less. Lea arrived late to work, as did her husband, who “stuck for an hour and a half in Choueifat traffic while he was driving the children to their school. They were also late in arriving to their school.” For his part, when Sami “despaired” of crossing the airport road in his car, he returned to his home and rode his motorcycle “without completely escaping the traffic.”
The faces of the stranded people were “scarred,” and insults such as “the corrupt state that does not repair sewage channels” were repeated, and the flood caused damage to homes, shops, and cars. As Reem left her home in Al-Awza’i, she was surprised by the presence of piles of waste in the middle of the roads, without knowing that she was swimming in a “river” of precipitation and sewage in the morning.
2023-10-05 03:34:34
#Proof #flood #Lebanons #roads #suffocating
