Siniora urges ministries to address storm fallout

 

Prime Minister Fouad Siniora urged the Interior and Public Works ministries as well as Electricite du Liban on Thursday to deploy the necessary efforts to reopen mountain roads that had been blocked by snow, while giving them loans to fulfill all their needs.

 

“The aforementioned institutions can also resort to the private sector to rent the machines they need should the need arise,” he said. “The most important thing is to reopen closed roads and repair [storm damage] to electricity networks.”

 

A severe storm has been battering Lebanon for the past several days, inflicting heavy losses on agricultural lands and playing havoc with electricity and telephone cables in several Lebanese regions.

 

Many villages have been isolated due to heavy snow that has even covered the Lebanese coast for the first time in years.

 

Private and public schools in most of Lebanon closed for the second day.

 

In the South, Hizbullah”s Jihad al-Binaa construction wing worked on clearing roads, while the party”s social workers distributed bread to villages in Marjayoun, Hasbaya and Arqoub.

“We thank the resistance and its leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, for supporting and standing by us in all circumstances,” Shwayya Mayor Hassib Ali Mahmoud told The Daily Star.

 

On Thursday, the Civil Aviation Department at Rafik Hariri International Airport in Beirut said the weather on Friday would be partly cloudy, with ice expected to form in the Bekaa Valley and the highlands.

 

The forecast called for northwesterly winds blowing at a speed varying between 10 and 35 kilometers per hour, with poor visibility in the highlands.

 

Temperatures are expected to vary between 3 and 10 degrees Celsius along the coast, between 1 degree Celsius below zero and 6 degrees in the mountains and between -1 and 7 degrees in the Bekaa.