Every year the rain passes over in Lebanon, endowing it with a resource that much of the Middle East can only dream of. But even as those rains fall and the country’s roads turn to rivers, many Lebanese still look up at the sky and ask why their water tanks are empty and their faucets are spitting out nothing but air. The reason is that since the end of the civil war little has been done to improve water reuse, although a lot of words have been spent. Only one large dam has been built in the Chabrouh area, 40 km outside the capital, holding a maximum of 15 million cubic meters (MCM). The only other major infrastructure project, the Qaraoun artificial lake, carries a maximum of 300 MCM of water and was built in 1959. Combined, their total storage capacity is less than 6 percent of renewable water resources,
