As this season's last drops of rain fall, many local communities, like the southern hillside community of Joun, worry about the minimal quantities of water reaching their households. While Lebanon witnessed a significant amount of rainfall this year, none was stored for the dry months of summer. Lebanon's most valuable resource was simply wasted.
Although natural aquifers restore some of their water capacity in the winter, those levels are still less than adequate to meet the growing demand for water in Joun’s community of 3,500 residents. This chronic shortage of water becomes particularly more difficult to manage during the summer, when Joun’s expatriates return and the population swells up to 8,000. It comes as no surprise that a recent survey revealed that 93 per cent of sampled residents think it is a priority to address the water shortage problem.
In an initial effort to turn the situation around, the Joun Municipality built a well to benefit from the water in natural aquifers. However, lacking the appropriate containers and distribution networks, households are still left with insufficient water supply. Today, Joun residents receive water only once per week as the available installations could not allow for water extraction and distribution at the same time.
In other words, water is available in Joun. Yet, it spends more time travelling through pipes than in the tanks of individual households. When water is extracted from the aquifer, it is transported to a tank at a local monastery several kilometers away. This requires cutting off the distribution network for 16 hours until the monastery tank is completely filled. To address this issue, Live Lebanon will work with the municipality to construct an elevated reservoir adjacent to the well. Water extracted from the aquifer will be efficiently stored in this new reservoir. In this way, the distribution networks would work at full capacity, and the water shortage issue will be dramatically reduced.