5 killed, many missing in Gaza sewage flood

[Scurrilous]

At least five people killed, thousands evacuated after sewage, mud flood northern Strip Bedouin village of Umm Naser. Defense Minister Peretz instructs IDF to provide assistance to Palestinians

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3381776,00.html

<snip>

"At least five people died and many more were missing after sewage and mud flooded a northern Gaza Strip village Tuesday morning, officials said.

The hospital in Beit Lahiya reported that an elderly woman, a 1-year-old baby, a 3-year-old child and a 15-year-old girl were among the casualties. Some 15 people were injured.

The Bedouin village, Umm Naser, was flooded when the earth wall of a large cesspool sewage pool collapsed. Palestinians reported that 70 percent of the houses were completely submerged in the sewage, and residents said more than 200 people were still missing in the village of 3,000.

Defense Minister Amir Peretz instructed the IDF to provide assistance to the Palestinians through the coordination mechanism in territories. Peretz ordered the army to prepare for a possibility of evacuating the injured to Israeli hospitals.

The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear."

[hobbit709]

1. Who has a cesspool upstream

of your living place?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

2. People with no options. Your compassion is overwhelming. n/t

[hobbit709]

3. Ask a question of science and sanitation

and get slammed for an alleged lack of compassion with nothing to base it on.

[pelsar]

4. poor planning....

N. Gaza is made up of sandy areas with relativly flat topography...small hills in various areas......also its relatively open areas compared to the much denser areas of middle gaza. The options of where to locate the facility was simply very poor planning probably related to the politics of land ownership.

(The villages in n. gaza (bedouin) dont have the political power of many of the others, made up of palestinians)

[Shaktimaan]

6. Interesting.

While I realize some folks out there (Hi progressivemuslim!) have no issues answering legit questions with knee-jerk reactionism, it goes to show that you just can't frame every aspect of life within Israel or Palestine in terms of the conflict.

[Casper Alabaster]

9. More on that,

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1173879186125
Israel's Mekorot Water Company offered to give humanitarian assistance to the village at the instruction of Infrastructures Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer by helping pump the sewage using a 700-meter hose and other equipment, as of Wednesday morning.

The Palestinians planned to use the hose to move sewage temporarily to prevent a further disaster to an open area which was a former settlement in the north of the Gaza Strip close to the village.

The assistance came after an appeal by Palestinian Water Authority Director-General Fadel Kawash.
And further: A 2004 United Nations report warned that the sewage facility was at its maximum capacity and flooding was inevitable unless a new waste treatment plant was constructed. It said that even without overflowing, the effluent lake posed a serious health hazard, providing a breeding ground for mosquitoes and waterborne diseases.

[uppityperson]

5. Incredible.

[Scurrilous]

7. In pictures: Sewage 'tsunami' hits Gaza

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6500079.stm

[Casper Alabaster]

8. Now at least 10 dead.

The cause of the collapse was not immediately clear.

Rescue crews and Hamas gunmen rushed to the area to search for people feared buried under the slide of sewage and mud.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1173879186125

[breakaleg]

11. "Hamas gunmen". Can't they report on a disaster without making a little dig?

[Shaktimaan]

12. wow, these poor people can't get a break.

That's really awful.

I found Hamas' reply interesting. I think there's a tendency to attach every possible setback or disaster to Israel somehow. This is nothing new, 'Israeli oppression' has been the standard reply to any and every issue faced by Palestinians living in the territories or surrounding refugee camps for decades. This isn't to say that Israel bears no responsibility for many of the hardships they face. But a culture of victimhood has been cultivated and grown over generations that, while difficult to discuss for obvious reasons, has hampered and will continue to haunt their nascent society for some time. A cycle like that is difficult to break. If you have been raised to believe that Israel is responsible for all of the ills in your society and that any efforts to improve things will likely be stifled as well it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy to some degree. You really can't overestimate the weight that cultural philosophies like that hold. It will be a huge problem when they do get a state of their own. Even though Palestinians are nearly the best educated society in the Middle East, generations of relying on an economy consisting mostly of foreign aid will probably make it difficult for them to develop a self-sustaining economy of their own.

Hopefully I am wrong, but the way Hamas casually shifts all blame over to Israel here serves as an example of what happens when everyone automatically understands that Israel is to blame, regardless of the nature of the problem. For instance, in the UN report by Duggard (sp?) recently published he had no qualms about placing the blame for increased domestic violence among Palestinians directly upon Israel. Responsibility lies in strange places nowadays.

Shepard said that since the report was published, international funding for a new plant had been secured but construction had not been able to go ahead because of the high security risks in the area.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum blamed international "sanctions against Palestinians, including Gaza and the West Bank" for the condition of Gaza's infrastructure.

Most foreign donors froze aid to the Palestinian government after Hamas swept to power in a 2006 general election, but Shepard said the Umm Naser project had not been affected by the boycott.

[meganmonkey]

10. UN warns of new Gaza sewage flood

:(

UN warns of new Gaza sewage flood

The UN has warned that there could be another cesspool collapse in the Gaza Strip, a day after at least five people were killed by a flood of raw sewage.

Three women and two toddlers died after a sewage treatment pool broke down in the northern village of Umm al-Naser.

Rescue teams are continuing their search for more bodies.

On Wednesday, the head of the UN relief and works agency in Gaza said a larger cesspool in the area was overloaded and could collapse at any time.

In a separate development, unidentified gunmen opened fire on a car of a local Hamas commander in Gaza City, witnesses and medics said.

They said the commander's wife and their two children were injured. It remains unclear if the commander himself was hurt.

'Bigger disaster'

"The real threat now comes from another facility up there which is equally overloaded," John Ging, the head of the UN relief and works agency in Gaza, told the Associated Press news agency.

"Except that this time it's 1.5 million cubic metres of waste water and sewage that could spill out into the area and cause an even bigger disaster," he said.

Mr Ging added that the UN had long warned that Tuesday's disaster would happen.

"This has been a tragedy that was predicted and documented. The United Nations published a report in 2004, predicting that unless action were taken, that exactly what happened yesterday would happen."

The report said that flooding was inevitable unless a new waste treatment plant was constructed.


more...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6503579.stm

[Scurrilous]

13. Israel sends floating pumps to Gaza to aid in sewage flood

<snip>

"Israel sent two large floating pumps into Gaza yesterday to help the Palestinians lower the level of sewage in the flooded area, said Peter Lerner, a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces' Civil Administration. One man seriously wounded in the flood has been hospitalized in Israel, Lerner said.

Dozens of bulldozers and trucks worked furiously yesterday to shore up a network of sewage basins in northern Gaza, a day after the collapse of one basin flooded a village with waste and killed five people.

Palestinian and UN officials moved people displaced from the village of Umm Naser to white tents on higher ground and scrambled to prevent the collapse of the other overloaded sewage pools. Another collapse could send sewage flooding into the far larger town of Beit Lahiya, causing an even greater disaster, local officials said.

"We're providing them with temporary shelter, and we're also starting the process of finding a quick solution for them until we finish the sand embankments around the pools and they can return to their houses," said Ismail Abu Shamalha, the governor of northern Gaza."

more