Water and electricity cuts

Anyone who comes to Beirut soon learns to live with water and electricity cuts as a fact of life.

This article is quite informative about the power situation:

Lebanon has an outdated and aging infrastructure that hasn’t been updated since before the end of a brutal and vicious civil war that lasted from 1975 to 1990. The infrastructure situation worsened in July 2006 when Israel and Hezbollah, a Lebanese political party with an armed wing, fought a month-long war that cost the government over $110 million in damages.







Beirut experiences power cuts on a scheduled basis. From what I understand, it's three hours everyday from 6am to 6pm, running backwards on a rotating 4 day schedule. There's even an app to check out the schedued power cuts. Because I am one of the lucky ones who can afford a generator (it's actually the building's generator, but each unit has to pay to be hooked up), the practical effect on me is the power off and be restored again in a couple of minutes when the back-up generator kicks in. I loathe to think of the environmental impact caused by running fuel generators. So despite paying for a 10 amp generator that will allow me to do so, I try not to use the air con when I know the generator is on. In the office, the power goes off multiple times during the day and sets off this annoying alarm. As at home, it quickly comes on again (though it can be interesting when you're sitting in a pitch black windowless toilet). All our computers are connected to auxillary power units or we'd never get any work done.

Water supply is eratic and you never know when your taps will run dry. It is not an uncommon sight to see water trucks trawling the streets filling up empty tanks. It has been explained to me that Beirut is in the midst of a drought, brought on by the fact that it didn't rain enough last winter. While that may be the case, I can't help feeling that part of the water problem is caused by the same things as the electricity shortage - poor management/infrastructure and also the 25% (or more) increase in Lebanon's population since the Syrian war started.

Because I'm living alone, water isn't such an issue for me as my tank is sufficient for my needs. However, when I had a couple of friends stay over for a week, I ran out of water on the last day of their visit. That wasn't particularly pleasant, but thankfully I had the foresight to store water in 5l and 2l bottles, so there was water for things like flushing the toilet and brushing teeth. My nice landlord filled up my tank the very next day. It was a wonderful to have water again. I can only imagine how horrible it must be to be without water for an extended period.