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Lebanon’s Qaraoun Lake Spews Out Tons of Dead Fish

Workers clean up dead carp fish from the shores of the reservoir on April 29, 2021. AFP
Workers clean up dead carp fish from the shores of the reservoir on April 29, 2021. AFP
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Lebanon’s Qaraoun Lake Spews Out Tons of Dead Fish

Workers clean up dead carp fish from the shores of the reservoir on April 29, 2021. AFP
Workers clean up dead carp fish from the shores of the reservoir on April 29, 2021. AFP

Tons of dead fish have washed up on the shore of the highly polluted lake of Qaraoun in eastern Lebanon in the past few days, an official said Thursday.

It was not immediately clear what caused the fish kill in Lake Qaraoun on the Litani river, which several local fisherman said was unprecedented in scale.

A preliminary report said a virus had killed only carp in the lake, but a veteran water expert said their deaths could also have been caused by pollution.

Hundreds of fish of all sizes lay dead on the banks of the more than five-kilometer-long lake Thursday, and the stench of their rotting flesh clung to the air.

Men shoveled carcasses into a wheelbarrow, as a mechanical digger scooped up more into the back of a truck.

"It's our third day here picking up dead fish," said Nassrallah el-Hajj, from the Litani River Authority, dressed in fishing waders, adding they had so far "carried away around 40 tons.”

On the water's edge, 61-year-old fisherman Mahmoud Afif said it was a "disaster.”

"In my life I've never seen anything like it," the father-of-two told AFP.

The Qaraoun lake was built as a reservoir on the Litani river in 1959 to produce hydropower and provide water for irrigation.

But in recent years experts have warned huge quantities of wastewater, industrial waste, and agricultural runoff containing pesticides and fertilizer flooding into it have made it increasingly toxic.

Since 2018 fishing has been forbidden in the reservoir as the fish there was declared unfit for human consumption, though fish from the lake have continued to appear in several markets.

The Litani River Authority and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon on Friday warned of a "viral epidemic,” and called for fishing to be forbidden in the Litani as well as in the lake.

It said the likely disease had only affected carp, while four other types of fish appeared to be unaffected.

Kamal Slim, a water expert who has been taking samples of water from the lake for the past 15 years, said pollution could also be the cause.

"Without analysis, we cannot be decisive," said the researcher.

But the lake is also home to cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, and in warmer months the excess nutrients from pollution have caused the bacteria to erupt into bright green blooms that release toxins.

"Right now there is a cyanobacteria bloom, though less thick than last year," he said.

That or a bacteria could be responsible for harming the fish, especially since they are weaker during the reproduction season.

"Another possibility is very toxic ammonium," he said.

In July 2016, Lebanese media reported that tons of fish floated to the surface overnight in the Qaraoun lake.

Slim said that was due to a toxic bloom and oxygen depletion.

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Varieties

In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
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In Beirut, a Photographer's Frozen Moments Slow Down Time and Allow the Contemplation of Destruction

A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)
A bomb dropped from an Israeli jet hits a building in Ghobeiri, Beirut, Lebanon, Tuesday, October 22, 2024. (AP Photo/ Bilal Hussein)

We watch video after video, consuming the world on our handheld devices in bites of two minutes, one minute, 30 seconds, 15. We turn to moving pictures — “film” — because it comes the closest to approximating the world that we see and experience. This is, after all, 2024, and video in our pocket — ours, others', everyone's — has become our birthright.
But sometimes — even in this era of live video always rolling, always recording, always capturing — sometimes the frozen moment can enter the eye like nothing else. And in the process, it can tell a larger story that echoes long after the moment was captured. That's what happened this past week in Beirut, through the camera lens of Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and the photographs he captured.
When Hussein set up his camera outside an evacuated Beirut apartment building Tuesday after Israel announced it would be targeted as part of military operations against Hezbollah, he had one goal in mind — only one. "All I thought of," he says, “was photographing the missile while it was coming down.”
He found a safe spot. He ensured a good angle. He wasn't stressed, he said; like many photographers who work in such environments, he had been in situations like this one before. He was ready.
When the attack came — a bomb, not a missile in the end — Hussein swung into action. And, unsurprisingly for a professional who has been doing this work for two decades, he did exactly what he set out to do.
Time slowed down
The sequence of images he made bursts with the explosive energy of its subject matter.
In one frame, the bomb hangs there, a weird and obtrusive interloper in the scene. It is not yet noticed by anyone around it, ready to bring its destruction to a building that, in moments, will no longer exist. The building's balconies, a split-second from nonexistence, are devoid of people as the bomb finds its mark.
These are the kind of moments that video, rolling at the speed of life or even in slow motion, cannot capture in the same way. A photo holds us in the scene, stops time, invites a viewer to take the most chaotic of events and break it down, looking around and noticing things in a strangely silent way that actual life could not.
In another frame, one that happened micro moments after the first, the building is in the process of exploding. Let's repeat that for effect, since even as recently as a couple generations ago photographs like this were rare: in the process of exploding.
Pieces of building are shooting out in all directions, in high velocity — in real life. But in the image they are frozen, outward bound, hanging in space awaiting the next seconds of their dissolution — just like the bomb that displaced them was doing milliseconds before. And in that, a contemplation of the destruction — and the people it was visited upon — becomes possible.
Tech gives us new prisms to see the world
The technology to grab so many images in the course of little more than one second — and do it in such clarity and high resolution — is barely a generation old.
So to see these “stills,” as journalists call them, come together to paint a picture of an event is a combination of artistry, intrepidity and technology — an exercise in freezing time, and in giving people the opportunity to contemplate for minutes, even hours, what took place in mere seconds. This holds true for positive things that the camera captures — and for visitations of violence like this one as well.
Photography is random access. We, the viewers of it, choose how to see it, process it, digest it. We go backward and forward in time, at will. We control the pace and the speed at which dizzying images hurtle at us. And in that process, something unusual for this era emerges: a bit of time to think.
That, among many other things, is the enduring power of the still image in a moving-picture world — and the power of what Bilal Hussein captured on that clear, sunny day in Beirut.