Lebanon's earthquakes, when's the next?

So Lebanon’s in an earthquake zone is it?

Well, err, yes. Dr Ata Elias’ address to the British Lebanese Business Group last week, richly if rather frighteningly peppered with pictures demonstrated numerous proofs of the fact. And as an introduction, citizens of Beirut felt a tremor as recently as the evening before Dr Elias' speech.

Dr. Elias is in the American University of Beirut Geology department and his specialist interest is earthquakes. No armchair geologist he, he’s gone out with digging equipment and dug-up small sections of two out of the three main faults (the other’s under water, just off the coast) affecting Lebanon, most notably the one where Africa meets the Arabian Peninsula (the thick red line on the map), then taken photographs of it. Yes, really, there’s an obvious boundary between the two - unbelievers, please see the picture below. Now, we can’t feel it, but Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are moving, very slowly but at different speeds and in different directions, so something has to give from time to time. Hence the Lebanese mountains with sea-shells embedded in them, clearly visible at two thousand metres up. 

According to Dr. Elias, no-one, it seems, can predict when that “something” is going to give, but the result is an earthquake.  More, when the giving is on an underwater fault, then a further consequence is a tsunami. Apparently, the sea retreated approximately three kilometres in 551 AD before surging back in to destroy much of Beirut and, according to contemporary accounts, “drown” Tripoli. What can be done is to calculate the average time between major events at a fault. For two of the faults it seems that if nature ran like clockwork, we could expect an event sooner rather than later. But of course nature doesn’t.  The energy of a quake can’t be predicted either.

Just what are the risks then? It isn’t a question of if but when a magnitude 7 plus earthquake will happen. Much of Beirut is built on sand, which behaves in a very strange way when mixed with water, say from a tsunami; it becomes quicksand and just sucks in anything on top of it.

So, if we can’t predict when, nor how big a ‘quake is going to be, what can we do? Well, we can plan for the consequences, engineers and architects need to structure buildings to be able to withstand the shock, architects and builders need to design in escape routes to high ground for locations, like beaches, near the coast, by teaching people at work, at home and in school what to do during a shock and by local government training the emergency services in coping with the aftermath.

Chile does this very well, Haiti did not; two recent earthquakes occurred in those two countries, the one in Chile, though a thousand times stronger, hardly made the news, while the devastation in Haiti, with a thousand times more deaths, dominated our TV screens for days. Yes, readiness can change the effect by the ridiculously large factor of a million! Where is Lebanon? The good news is that a law was passed in the last decade laying our standards for buildings, and there’s a sign on the AUB beach saying that if the sea retreats, get to high ground immediately. Other than that, the feeling is that Lebanon is a long long way from Chile’s readiness.

Dr. Elias is passionate that his mission is to discover all he can about earthquakes and promote awareness about them and their consequences in the region. If you get a chance, listen to what he has to say and, if you are an engineer, town planner or just buying your own home take note and act.

Public speaking anyone? The English Speaking Union addresses the BLBG

What would you do with a spare $100?

Enjoy a celebration dinner for two? Buy a designer label shirt perhaps? Order the top five or so best selling books from Amazon? Start a successful organisation to promote the English language?

“Whoops, sorry, could you run that last one past me again please?” do I hear you say? Certainly, no problem, because that’s exactly what Youmna Asseily did in 2003.

Youmna is chairman of the Lebanese chapter of the English Speaking Union (ESU). A British charity, founded just after World War I, there are now over sixty other chapters in such diverse places as Australia, Brazil and China. Yesterday evening, Youmna addressed members of the British Lebanese Business Group (BLBG) with the stated objective of explaining the work of ESU Lebanon and as an aside showed us the power of oratory in action (that’s speaking to inspire - without the “help” of PowerPoint). A joy to watch and to listen to she was.

To digress, yesterday was International Women’s Day centenary, so to have Youmna address the BLBG on that day was both serendipitous and apposite. Her audience was not quite half ladies, but did include HE Ambassador Frances Guy, and the Director of the British Council, Barbara Hewitt a grouping that would have been rather different in 1911. Given that sixty per cent of UK graduates are now women, I suspect that the currently lowly percentage of women on the Boards and in charge of British companies will have changed dramatically in less than another hundred years.

But back to the ESU Lebanon – Youmna explained that it has four main programs to achieve its stated aim of promoting international cooperation through the use and practice of English. There’s an annual public speaking competition; ESU Lebanon are rightly proud that it was won by a Lebanese student last year, earning him a trip to Buckingham Palace to receive his award from Prince Phillip: doubtless a treasured memory for life. The Debating challenge, drama experience through a tie-up with the Shakespeare Globe Theatre and workshops in creative writing with the help of the University of Iowa make up the other three. Donations and memberships fund these and provide the means for sending a few lucky young people on scholarships too.

If you want to help the work of this organisation or just want to know more, click on the links to go direct to ESU Lebanon’s web-site. And if you can’t think of a way of spoiling yourself with that spare thirty odd dollars, never mind a hundred, you could always become a member of ESU Lebanon with it.

BLBG meeting Jan '11 - traffic in Beirut

The British Lebanese Business Group (BLBG for short) met on Tuesday this week.

The group has been fortunate enough to attract some really good speakers living and working in Lebanon in the past, but never before a Director of a British Company viewing the business climate here from the outside. Johnny Ojeil is just that, a Director of Arups, the British multi-national construction firm, he’s a son of Birmingham, but with recent Lebanese ancestry. The group was pleased and honoured to have him as guest speaker.

He was actually upbeat listing professionalism, language skills and being technologically savvy as some of the positive traits of the Lebanese workforce. Being a pleasant place to live, having a plethora of local firms willing and able to do business with overseas companies and the ability to move money freely in and out of the country he identified as positive characteristics of Lebanon’s business environment, together with an apparently strong economy is spite of those things listed below.

There’s always a downside and his “con” list included political uncertainty and cash flow in the sense that if cash (not the same thing as money!) is not available, then projects just stop. That there is no urban planning policy and that projects spend a long time gestating were things at considerable variance from European practice so beware and be ready.

Local partnership is the way forward for any company seeking to do business here; this was both his experience and recommendation. He seemed both cautiously optimistic yet with a positive “and here’s a way to do it” message.

Now Mr. Ojeil’s own specialty is urban traffic planning and he’s acting as consultant to Bierut’s Solidere. He painted a grim picture of where Beirut could be heading without a mass transit solution that would appeal to all but the truly moneyed classes. Luxury buses, with train inspired interiors could be an inexpensive solution able to be implemented quickly and cheaply with the political will to make it happen. There was some amusement at the idea of bus lanes in Beirut (“for each bus they’d be five Mercedes in the lane, three in front and two behind”) which stimulated debate on the issue of traffic enforcement. The amusement evaporated as he left us in no doubt as to the consequences of increasing dependency on the four-wheeled friend; “next time you explain that you are late because of traffic, don’t forget that you were part of the problem and not just the victim”, “look where Bangkok got to, four hour queues!” He ran a computer simulaton, to show us future potential Downtown Beirut traffic flow – ouch! Johnny helped solve Bangkok’s problems, so he’s to be taken seriously.

A lively question and answer session followed with many of the over fifty participants joining in until we broke for a final round of networking, as well as a final round at the bar.

Looking forward to the next session already.

Please note that any divergence from fact and reality in the record above should be attributed to your errant reporter (me) and not to our guest.

BLBG meeting, "Regenerating Beirut"

Coventry after WWII, Sheffield after the steel industry collapsed and Glasgow because it needed to, all become models of urban regeneration with what modern marketing men would call a brand image – anyone remember the campaign “Glasgow smiles better”?

Nearly twenty years ago, a team of architects, engineering consultants and town planners conceived a master plan for Beirut. One of the leaders of that team was a gentleman by the name of Angus Gavin, now head of Urban Development with Solidere, the company responsible for implementing that plan and managing the real estate created.

About forty members of the BLBG (British Lebanese Business Group), together with HMA to the Lebanon, Frances Guy, had the good fortune to be addressed by Angus about the past, present and future for urban Beirut (known as Down Town). He knows his stuff and used over sixty slides with more than two hundred images in total to support his address on the current status of and the future plans for regenerating Beirut.

Green spaces, pedestrian walkways, buildings restored with local skills that many had thought lost, like stone masonry, modern sky-scrapers and a restored water front are all blended together to create an integrated living, shopping, working and recreational space for locals and tourists alike.

Well, that’s the theory.

And practice is getting close. OK there are issues with parking (not enough), security (too intrusive), a few basic needs (“I can’t buy a bottle of milk”, someone complained) and Solidere’s share price (it stubbornly refusing to budge despite the nearly doubling of real estate values in the last three years). Some of those natural market forces will fix, others need a change of habit, lifestyle and the focusing of political will. Old photos of Beirut show tramcars, taxis and a railway station. Only the service system of taxi sharing survives, but Angus believes that the not too distant future will see dramatic improvements in public transport in line with trends in other major world cities and the increasing urgency of finding greener methods of travel.

From the work done to date, Beirut is now a recognized brand in the field of Mediterranean urban planning, with the concepts being exported to Cairo, Jeddah and Montenegro. All it needs now is a tag line: pity, but “Beirut smiles better” has been done before.

Please note that any errors of fact in this are entirely mine