Less blue, more gold

Toufic Abillamaa has been making money off of the state’s inability to provide certain services for nearly 40 years. His company, Abillamaa Petroleum, delivers fuel for generators — a necessity for many in a country without 24 hours of electricity. At the beginning of this year, however, he decided to expand into water delivery. Abillamaa is capitalizing on a booming business. Looking at the traffic clogged streets of Beirut, it is clear that Lebanon’s unregulated private water distributors are thriving. Water trucks are everywhere, and the sound of their pumps is nearly as ubiquitous as car and motorbike horns. But despite this flourishing business and the ominous water shortages it evidences, putting an exact figure on the size of the industry is just as difficult as trying to ascertain the impact extra pumping has on groundwater resources. Reliable data for both metrics is nearly impossible to get. Driving margins [pullquote]“Before,