Tag Archives: Electricity

Electricity Goes Off… At Beirut’s International Airport

With my flight a few hours away, this news is surely reassuring. At 11:15 am today, electricity went off at Beirut’s International Airport (or the Rafic Hariri International Airport as they call it these days). (Source).

Personnel rushed to get the situation fixed. The problem seemed to have originated straight from the source: EDL.

I wonder, if this had happened at night, how many people would have died? Don’t they even have backup generators that would ignite the moment anything of the sort happens to ensure smooth and continuous electrical coverage?

It seems even our most important facilities as a country are going down the drain. And what a splendid image we’re giving to those visiting. The moment they land… bye electricity… yes, this is the way things are here. Better get used to it by now.

Ahla w sahla fikon bi Lebnen. 

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Congratulations Lebanon. The Whole Country Won’t Have Electricity Tonight!

EDL held a meeting this afternoon – exceptionally – to bestow upon us the good news. (Source).

You don’t get electricity. I don’t get electricity. We ALL don’t get electricity.

What’s electricity useful for again?

Why do they want to bring the whole country into blackout? Because EDL HQ have apparently been occupied by workers who don’t really work and who are displeased by the decision to let them off.

Therefore, somehow, making the whole country suffer is the way those whose jobs are safe at EDL decide to retaliate .

I guess those 2 or 3 hours were also considered as too much for people like us.

I never thought I’d say this but I actually want Gebran Bassil to come out winning of this. Enough with the pandering of nonexistent resources. Enough with useless workers breaking the back of whatever we have left in our coffers. Enough with politicians getting their people a job they will never attend to just because they need their votes every few years.

To all you couples out there, candlelight dinners are especially romantic. Perhaps the state of hopelessness will get you to seek a higher degree of comfort… if you know what I mean.

Gebran Bassil is an Awesome Stand Up Comedian!

Poor Gebran Bassil!

Didn’t you hear? He hasn’t had electricity in his house for FOUR days! FOUR! Even his generator is busted. How unlucky can one get? You would think the other few million Lebanese have a worse electricity situation.

But no. Gebran has it worse than all of us.

In fact, he has it so bad that his wife had to go out with her friends because they couldn’t do a surprise birthday party for her at their house. He had to take care of the kids.

Such a great dad too!

And you know what’s worse?

He’s also a victim of the Summer wedding season. And he attended a wedding where the bride and groom, as well as those attending, were melting from the heat because the Church didn’t have electricity to turn on the AC.

Poor, poor Gebran Bassil. My heart is breaking. How can someone not sympathize with such candid awesomeness by the minister of energy?

And he’s got news, fellow Lebanese. The electricity situation is about to get worse. How many hours do you get it per day? 2? Make those 30 minutes. That should be enough, no?

Don’t blame Bassil for the electricity crisis. He’s providing much needed comic relief! Who needs A/C again?

And he’s got a request for you…. You need to take it down to the streets. Because he – and you – can’t tolerate this anymore.

7ayet l wazir se3be ya jame3a. 

Happy birthday to his wife! Alla ywaffe2 l 3ersein.

Click here and jump to 26:45.

Now in all seriousness, how can a minister fathom sharing such stories in a press conference about one of the most serious matters in the country and still be taken seriously?

There’s a limit to what you can say and, regardless of what you think about Gebran Bassil politically, sharing stories about his wife and weddings he’s invited to is not something you talk about. Never. Not even to illustrate a point.

He’s not the reason behind the electricity crisis? Sure. But his handling of it is so laughable that Gebran Bassil turns out to be quite awesome… at being a stand up comedian that is.

Nemr Abou Nassar who?

 

Two Days in the Life of a Lebanese in Beirut

It starts early in the morning. You wake up and the heat is already beyond an acceptable value. You look at your phone. Nothing on that lockscreen.

You had forgotten. The country has been disconnected from the internet for two days now. You get out of bed forcibly. The day must start. You flick on the light switch. Nothing.

So they’re cutting it 6 am – 9 am today? Neat. At least you’ll have power when you get home, right? You go towards the kitchen to prepare some coffee. You hold the teapot under the water valve. Nothing comes out. No coffee for you? But no. You are more than prepared. Hello Tannourine bottles!

A day at work or class later, you go back home. There’s electricity. But the internet and water are still nowhere to be found. The former is unusual while the latter is typical for any Beiruti summer.

As you get out of your clothes for something more relaxing, you look at the time. 3:30 pm. And the light goes out. You wonder if the switch (disjoncteur) had been overpowered by something you might have turned on by mistake. You run down the stairs of your old Beiruti building which doesn’t have an elevator and you find out that no, it’s not the switch.

You run back up the stairs and reach the landing of your apartment, sweating like a pig. Perhaps going back home hastily was a bad idea.

30 minutes later, your only source of cooling in that house, the A/C, springs to life. You praise any deity you could think of and type away at your computer, finishing up some leftover work stuff because you don’t have internet to check Facebook, Twitter or even your email. Before you know it, the screen on your laptop dims. You look at the laptop’s electricity plug and you find its light off. You glance at your watch. It’s 4:00 PM.

Thank you for 30 minutes of electricity? But it’s not done yet. 30 minutes later, you hear your fridge hum again only to hear it die down 30 minutes later. Christmas lights-esque electricity from 3 to 6 pm? You bet.

So you sit there, looking at the wall in front of you. You have no electricity, no internet and no water. It’s too hot outside for you to wander somewhere – anywhere – and for the first time in your existence in Lebanon, despite everything, you feel like you are living in a third world country.

But as it is with you being the deservedly proud Lebanese that you are, you shrug it off. Tomorrow is another day. And then your phone buzzes. You look at it and behold, there’s an iMessage there! Yes, tomorrow is another day indeed.

Lebanese Forces Website Turns Into a Joke

Just so you don’t think I have a blind vendetta against Tayyar.org with me bashing them on different occasions (check those here & here), it’s now the Lebanese Forces website’s turn to take a hit.

We’ve all been suffering through horrible electricity outages. Even Beirut is getting 6 hour cuts. Different sides are taking different opinions regarding the matter, as usual, depending on which end of the political spectrum they belong to.

Those opinions can be summed up with the following: Blame Bassil vs Don’t blame Bassil.

I don’t like Gebran Bassil and as a voter in the Batroun caza I won’t vote for him when he runs here – again – in 2013. That won’t end up doing much since he will end up as a minister – again. But I would have done what I can.

When it comes to the electricity problem, however, there’s a drastic difference between putting the entirety of the sector’s woes on him, as some people are doing, and actually acknowledging that the problem didn’t start with him, although his handling of the whole issue isn’t top-notch. For the record, I have blogged before about the electricity problem and about how silly Gebran Bassil was when he threatened civil strife against his one-sided government if they didn’t comply with his electricity plan.

All the political talk aside, you’d expect a reputable political website which should be concerned with, well, politics not to flaunt such a post on their Facebook page, which holds over 57000 likes.

The article they linked to can be accessed (here) and it features a collection of pictures such as the following:

Some of you might think these pictures are funny and you can share them on your Facebook and Twitter timelines all you want for all I care. But it’s unacceptable for the website of one of Lebanon’s leading parties to make an “exclusive” out of them. It’s unacceptable for that website to use them as material in order to please its readers.

How about Lebanese-Forces.com and tayyar.org stop running tabloid-ish “news” and focus on real issues instead? What does either website hope to accomplish by running silly articles about the politicians of the other?

The 2013 elections, if they happen, will be here before we know it. The article in question has over 700 Facebook “likes.” Brainwashing is here in full swing.

Earth Hour in Lebanon

20120331-131122.jpg

Observing Earth Hour in Lebanon begs the question: what’s the point?
And if you think about it, there isn’t any. How so?

Well for starters, half of the country will forcibly go dark at Earth Hour. Yes, electricity shortages will hit. It defeats the purpose of voluntarily switching off your lights for an hour when you’re involuntarily going through the process every day. And not just for one hour.

We also have a gas prices crisis so you know people aren’t going around like they used to. It’s just so expensive to go that kilometer by car nowadays. So we walk instead. It’s greener, healthier and we get to enjoy the beauty of our urbanized mountains.

Moreover, we’ve had the rotten meat fiasco lately. So many people have drastically decreased their intake of the substance, thereby going greener – literally. And you know “green” food is more eco-friendly than cows and goats.

So for all matters and purposes, our carbon footprint has been rendered so meaningless that it would register as a statistical error in studies. Everyday in Lebanon is Earth Day. We should receive a medal for it.
I, for one, am not turning off my lights for the hour of grid-connection I get. I have them turned off for the other 23.

Introducing: Lebanese Memes

[Edit]: It looks like Lebanese Memes would be a better description for what this is than Lebanese 9Gag. So I have decided to change it.

We all love 9gag. Actually, scratch that. We all LOVE 9gag. You go on 9gag and then, 5 hours later, you’re surprised how the time passed.

9gag is also the reason I’m staying awake during classes. So I figured why not bring in cool internet memes and give them a Lebanese flavor.

What’s the reason behind this? Well, sometimes laughing at all the problems our country is facing is the best way to deal with them without going into a dark phase of Lebanon-hating.

And so we begin, the first Lebanese Meme – a commentary on the electricity situation:

Lebanon's Electricity Crisis - Lebanese 9Gag

I thought about translating the memes… and then I figured it would be a total disaster. “3ouzran ya kalbe [Bitch please], Sa yakrah l karihoun [haters gonna hate], 2essa 7a2i2iye [True story], Ana b7ebb [Me Gusta]” – No. Just no.

If you have any pic you did and would like to have it posted, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Lebanon’s Electricity Crisis: The Gebran Bassil Paradigm

As I’m writing this, I’m looking at the light bulb we have installed in our house to let us know if the electricity we’re having is provided by our “moteur” subscriber or by Electricite du Liban. It is lit. So much for EDL.

What’s troubling is that this lightbulb has been lit a lot these past few days. Hold on, I stand corrected. This light bulb has been lit a lot these past two months. I know this firsthand because my father is one of those moteur providers you like to hate so much for overcharging you. But when you don’t get electricity for 330 hours in a given month, the moteur provider will have to charge you.

What I don’t get, however, is why Lebanon’s electricity has suddenly gone into dying mode, especially in the last two months. I understand having to go through a weekend of total blackout in Beirut due to a protest in a power plant. But to go on for two months without getting half a day of coverage is way exaggerated if you ask me.

Has Lebanon’s need for power suddenly exponentially increased beyond what it was a couple of months ago? I hardly think so. Did the dismal capacity of our power plants exponentially decline in the past two months? I hardly think so as well. What has changed in the last two months is the way the Minister of Energy’s brain neurons are firing.

This is Gebran Bassil – Batroun’s “pride and joy”

I’ll just come out and say it. I do not like Gebran Bassil. Never have and I’m guessing never will. Perhaps that’s why we voted against him and got him to lose twice. But how good is that when he’s always finding his way to power?

Gebran Bassil reminds me of kindergarten days. That short, plumped bully kid you all hate and have no idea how he can actually bully everyone. Then you remember. Someone has his back. The fact that he lost two successive parliamentary elections and still made his way to three successive cabinets, even becoming a major hurdle to the instillment of the second, is only indicative of how spoiled he is and how used he is to getting his way, never hearing no as an answer to anything he requests.

The latest? He’s actually threatening the current government of taking it to the streets to get his way when it comes to the proposed electricity bill. I’m not sure he knows this but wouldn’t he be protesting against his own allies? And wouldn’t taking it to the streets to fight for a proposed law be a hurdle towards the advancement of a state the way Michel Aoun & co want it – “change and reform”?

As far as I’m concerned, when it comes to the electricity situation in Lebanon nowadays, Gebran Bassil is not reforming. He is deforming. There’s nothing working about it. And as long as he keeps acting like an insolent brat and not a minister, it will not head in the right direction anytime soon.

Perhaps when a politician’s allies are not responsive to the “plans” he or she is introducing would be an obvious enough hint that they’re doing something wrong. But I guess that logic doesn’t flow well with Mr. Bassil. The fact that he is part of a one-sided government and is constantly facing hurdles doesn’t warrant him to feel paranoid and targeted. It simply means he’s not doing things right.

So dear Lebanese, plan your showers according to the electricity cycles in your correspondent region. If your electricity coverage is not adequate, there’s always a bucket and a stove for you. Or better yet, plan your whole life to constantly fluctuating electricity cycles. Let’s add another fear to the long list a Lebanese society suffers from: electrophobia.

Blackout Beirut: The Recent Electricity Crisis in Lebanon

I felt like I was in a war zone this past weekend when the power in Beirut kept circulating between three hours of grid connection and three hours of grid disconnection. Perhaps the “highlight” of my day was trying to shower using a lit candle as your only source of light.

I am used to electricity outages. I am from a village in Northern Lebanon where more than 12 hours of coverage per day is seen by many as some form of the second coming of Christ. But in my village in North Lebanon, I have a “moteur” subscription which fills in the many blanks left by the electricity we should get from our dear state. In my Achrafieh neighborhood, however, you don’t have “moteur” providers because you never needed them before. Add to that grandparents who have been through weeks and weeks of no-electricity during the civil war and it makes the three hours tolerable for a power-needing person like me.

But no matter, as Beirut cycled between Beirut-on and Beirut-off in three hour turns, even the iPhone app to track the outages didn’t work anymore. And I had no idea what was happening until I watched the news and saw that workers from South Lebanon had apparently decided to strike at the Zahrani Power Plant. A little delving into this and a political nature of the strike is also revealed. Nearby municipalities supported the decision of the plant’s “workers” for strike. The “apparent” cause? Electricite du Liban (EDL) decided to move a 40 MVA transformer from the Plant to the nearby city of Saida.

Part of the news report I watched has Southerners complain about them being “left out,” about them being “targeted” by the Lebanese state with only few hours of coverage per day. My initial reaction was: are they [insert obscene word] kidding me?

Let’s get  a few things straight.

1) The Southerners are not the only people who have suffered in Lebanon. It’s 2011. The Israelis left 11 years ago. The July 2006 war happened, well, in 2006. We all stood by them through all of their Israel-related misery. We harbored them in our schools, gave them food from our homes and did what any proper citizen would do. They can stop accusing the whole country of targeting them whenever something doesn’t go their way.

2) I get as much coverage as they do in my village in North Lebanon and yet you don’t find me storming power plants and cutting power for those who have it. This is NOT the way you solve things.

3) Apparently our beloved minister Gebran Bassil (whom we, in my caza, voted against a bunch of times and yet always found in power) couldn’t even get the political parties behind the “workers” to get them to stop their “strike.” This begs the question: if the minister of energy, who’s also a proud ally of those political parties, can’t reign them in, then who can? This also raises doubt on exactly how far Aoun can control Hezbollah. Mr. Aoun was always proud of being Hezbollah’s main ally in the country, believing that Hezbollah did whatever Aoun wanted. Well, not always, is it?

4) Now that our prime minister Miqati has apparently sorted things out, the question asks itself: what if Hezbollah decides to act out again? what’s there to stop them? If their own allies can’t do anything against them then who can? What’s to stop this whole “I can do whatever I want and you can’t do anything about it” mentality that they have?

As I came back to my Achrafieh neighborhood at 6 pm today, I was struck by how dark it was. Few were the buildings that had lights in them. The streets were dark. The people were gloomy. I couldn’t wait to go back home to North Lebanon where there was actually light and mind you, my house in Achrafieh is exactly halfway between St. George’s and Geitawi hospitals – you’d think an area where two hospitals were located would get some preferential treatment. But no matter. A friend in Jal El Dib had 8 minutes of electricity all day today. A friend in Mansourieh a little more than 8 minutes but also a dismal amount. And yet, you don’t find us storming roads, burning tires, calling for strikes in power plants in our regions. It’s not that we couldn’t do that. The easiest thing to do is spur violence. What’s not easy, however, is to suck it up and work on fixing the electricity situation, which has been coexistent with our life as far as I can remember, with a radical solution, not ruin whatever few megawatts other people get.

And this is one of the reasons, dear Hezbollah, I can never – ever – support you.

But you know what’s interesting? Out of all the governments that have been ruling the country since 2005, this is probably the most dysfunctional one. What’s sad? It’s one-sided and made up mostly of those who want to change and reform. Well, here’s how it goes: over promise, under-give, the system blows up, blame others.