2023-07-05 05:49:00
For 70 years, the residents of Chekka have been adjacent to the “Aternate Lebanon” factory. Since then, mourning has been witnessed almost every day between the neighbors of the factory, which has been closed since 1991, and whose equipment and remaining goods are still spreading death in the region. The slabs and pipes of Eternite exposed to weather factors that do their job in dispersing deadly “asbestos” atoms, the primary cause of lung cancer. The bankruptcy court.
32 years, during which death claimed many lives, without anyone moving a finger. And whenever the file passed to one of the successive ministers in the Ministry of Environment, the discussions ended with the necessity of “traveling the materials”, without there being any plan for that … Finally, the Minister of Environment, Nasser Yassin, proposed to a Scottish expert (he was assigned to conduct a study on the spread of “asbestos”). In the air following the port explosion) to visit the “Aternit Lebanon” factory to conduct a detailed study, and to form a committee of experts that visited the factory two weeks ago to submit proposals to the Bankruptcy Court by dismantling, isolating and treating hazardous materials in safe ways. According to Hasan Dahini, an adviser to the Minister of Environment who specializes in toxicology, a number of proposals are being worked on, including the establishment of a sanitary landfill for these materials. However, he admits that reaching the end is not easy, apart from the strict criteria that must be taken, there is a large cost of work that Minister Yassin estimates at “millions of dollars, and this is not easy for the state, and it is currently being considered to request assistance from international organizations.”
According to the Ministry of Environment’s sources, one of the options that is closest to logic “and the best and cheapest is to establish a sanitary landfill, provided that it is close to the factory.” And accordingly, “work begins with wrapping the entire factory and working on dismantling it and wrapping the equipment in ways that take into account health and environmental conditions so that asbestos atoms and air pollution do not fly out.” Today, he is working on estimating the cost, in addition to the fact that the Scottish expert “took air samples to estimate the percentage of hazardous materials, provided that the expert committee makes a second visit to him before the final report is issued.”
The “Eternit Lebanon” factory was established in Chekka in 1952. At that time, it was an “ideal” factory, says Pierre Abi Chahine, head of the Environmental Protection Authority in Chekka, and people flocked to him to work in it “because he was paying large and important pensions.” Work continued on it with such eagerness until 1956, when echoes of studies arrived from Europe and America confirming that the “asbestos” present in every detail in the factory (the atrnet panels, pipes, walls, and ceiling) causes cancer. On this basis, the owner, Stephen Chedheni, began arranging his affairs to recover his capital before selling the factory in 1982 to Lebanese businessmen. He sold it for “plush” in order to get rid of it and left, while the factory continued to spread death around it until 1991, when the people of the region began to complain regarding its danger, “and a committee emerged that included representatives of companies to find solutions,” Abu Shaheen continues, but nothing happened, until the year 2000, when the owners of the factory went bankrupt, and the Ministry of Justice appointed a judicial guard over the factory. However, the latter, who did not receive a large part of his salary, “sold millions of dollars worth of equipment from the factory at $180,000 to collect his rights, without adhering to public safety measures.” Today, the plant is subject to the bankruptcy commission under the supervision of the bankruptcy court.
Throughout those years, the factory remained open without packaging, and this, according to the law, is a “crime,” Abu Shaheen added, referring to “evidence” that “asbestos” caused the death of 36 out of 52 who worked in the factory, or regarding 70% of the number of workers. . This is what Dahini, advisor to the Minister of Environment, classifies as “occupational exposure,” as the injury is more closely related to those who work directly. Because people did not realize the seriousness of the disease, it was transmitted to the family members of the infected worker due to the absence of prevention guidelines. And “another crime,” Abu Shaheen continues, was caused by the owners of the factory, as there was no observance of health work conditions, so the employees used to work in their normal clothes without precautionary measures, “and they would go to their homes in those clothes, taking dust with them, which led to the injury of many.” From the families of workers, most of whom are young, with cancer.
Death is “at work” there, and every day someone is killed by “mesothelioma” cancer that affects the lung membrane, so that the patient reaches the stage of death by suffocation. According to Dhini, the seriousness of this disease is that it “can be transmitted from the lung membrane to the membranes of the heart.”
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