Caretaker Lebanese Transport Minister Ali Hamieh (second from left) met with other ministers and caretaker premier Najib Mikati on Dec. 1, 2022. (Credit: Twitter/@alihamie_lb)
BEIRUT — Caretaker Minister of Public Works and Transport Ali Hamieh said Thursday that he has mobilized $22 million to the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR) to work on road maintenance projects, he announced on his Twitter account.
This announcement came following serious floods due to heavy rainfall earlier this week, particularly in Kisrawan and Jbeil. People have been circulating images and videos of roads overflowed by torrents of muddy water, with many blaming the Public Works Ministry for not carrying out road maintenance.
"The CDR has been entrusted with the maintenance work on roads according to the needs of road safety, thanks to an amount of $22 million taken from the World Bank loan," wrote Hamieh, after a meeting of the National Council for Road Safety at Beirut's Grand Serail.
The caretaker minister did not specify which WB loan he was referring to. Prior to the severe crisis that has shaken Lebanon since 2019, the Parliament and the WB had approved a package of nearly $200 million dedicated to road rehabilitation in Lebanon.
With public infrastructure weakened by an economic crisis that began in 2019, Lebanon found itself once again unprepared for winter storms. Intense rains often flood large swaths of coastal areas. On October 24, heavy rains severely flooded large parts of Lebanon's coastal areas, resulting in the death of an elderly disabled man.
The WB has also been financing, since last winter — a year behind the original schedule — the Emergency Social Safety Net program (ESSN), via a loan of $246 million. The program will run for three years and target approximately 150,000 households. The World Bank also provided a $150 million loan to subsidize wheat imports into the country, whose currency has depreciated sharply over the last three years.