After a powerful storm, the Delhamiye plane close to Zahle city is entirely covered by strangely still floodwater. It is already night and the waters reflect the faraway city lights, like a nearby galaxy’s evil twin. A vehicle from the Ministry of Social Affairs lies half sunk in a nearby canal. We are improvising a wooden boards bridge over the roaring canal to rescue more than one hundred refugees from a flooded refugee settlement. Two terrified cats watch the narrow bridge, hesitating. The temperature is dropping quickly but the Syrian children are still taking the whole thing as an adventure, perhaps as an opportunity to see more of the Bekaa valley, to exit the informal refugee settlement from which they rarely travel.
The 2019 winter storms in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, inhabited by more than 360,000 Syrian refugees, have been the worst in many years. They have destroyed crops, flooded refugee sites and forced more than one thousand Syrian refugees to be evacuated to secure camps. Now that they are over, it is a good moment to take stock and learn some lessons from the response.
Continue reading “Flood response in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon – what have we learnt?”