Sanitation Updates

By Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor

(…)  Until that day their home was just downhill from a deep pond of sewage, pumped into a depression in the dunes and held there by earth walls because the water authorities in the Gaza Strip had nowhere else to put it.

‘Wall of human waste’ 

On 27 March 2007, the walls gave way. Aziza heard someone shouting, telling her to run away. She got out of the hut, then went back in because she had forgotten her head covering. The wall of raw human waste slammed into them. It knocked her down and tore the baby from her arms. 

(…)

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JERUSALEM/GAZA, 25 March 2008 (IRIN) - Design errors, a fast growing population, the halting in recent years of development projects, and restrictions on imports have rendered the Gaza Strip’s sewage system incapable of handling the enclave’s waste, experts said.

The result is the pumping of partially treated or untreated sewage directly into the sea and the seepage of dirty water into the ground and groundwater.

“The environmental situation in Gaza is bad and getting worse,” an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) expert on water and sanitation said in an interview with IRIN.

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SANAA, 5 March 2008 (IRIN) - Sanitation services in Yemen are limited. Almost all villages in rural areas, where 75 percent of Yemen’s 21 million people live, still use traditional means: Sewage is either dumped in watercourses or piped onto open ground.

Officials at the Ministry of Water and Environment said the government was striving to improve sanitation services, but lacked funds.

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AMMAN, 4 March 2008 (IRIN) - A crumbling sewage system in the city of Zarqa, 30km east of Amman, could trigger the spread of diseases on a large scale, according to community leaders and residents.

“We warned officials at the Ministry of Water on several occasions that the city’s sewage network is collapsing at a rapid pace under the mounting pressure of the population,” city mayor Mohammad Ghweiri told IRIN.

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CAIRO, 3 March 2008 (IRIN) - Nearly all Egyptians - 98 percent of the population - have access to piped water but only some have proper sanitation facilities. Not much attention has been paid to the effective and safe disposal of sewage, especially in rural areas, say specialists.

In rural areas - deserts and agricultural areas alike - only 58 percent of inhabitants have access to any kind of sanitation, said Rania El-Essawi, water, environment and sanitation officer at the Cairo office of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Most rural sanitation is primitive, and does not involve a proper sewage system. 

Read More - IRIN

Most of Sana’a’s approximately 270 public schools have no toilets, while those that do are in such unhygienic conditions that neither students nor teachers can use them. Further, at least six to eight schools within the capital’s eight public school districts have no bathrooms at all. At best, Sana’a public schools have three to six toilets for every 4,000 to 5,000 students, but without soap, water and a clean toilet, these bathrooms aren’t fit for student use.

The capital city’s public schools handle between 430,000 and 450,000 students, most of whom are elementary students, while school attendance for those under age 12 increases 10 to 15 percent annually.

Read More - Yemen Times

23 Jan 2008, Source Weekly

Various recent news media report from Gaza that the water and waste water treatment facilities there suffer badly from Israel’s security concerns about importing of energy, pumps, pipes and other spare parts in the Hamas controlled area. Since May 2007, 149 public wells in Gaza have had too little fuel to operate and have not been maintained due to the lack of parts. As a result 15 percent of Gaza’s population (225,000 people) get water for only two hours per day.

Furthermore, the poor quality water has not been tested for more than a year, because laboratories have been unable to import chemicals to test it. Tests carried out by the World Health Organization (WHO) several years ago concluded that Gaza’s water is unfit for human consumption.

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