Jiyeh power station oil spill

Jiyeh, on the coast south of Beirut, has Lebanon's largest thermal power station. On 14 and 15 July 2006 its fuel tanks were hit by the Israeli air force. Part of the fuel oil burned; the rest went into the sea and, pushed northwards, reached about 150 km of Lebanese and Syrian coastline. Some of it emulsified and solidified along the shore, some sank off the plant.

The clean-up began while the war was still going on, with a major role for civil-society environmental groups, since the Lebanese state had limited capacity (Takshe et al. 2010). Funds from Japan and Norway and teams from the United States, Switzerland and Italian divers contributed; according to Wikipedia about 2.9 million dollars was raised against damage estimated by the UN at 203 million.

At the request of the Lebanese Ministry of Environment, UNEP inspected the coast from Tyre to Tripoli at nearly 30 sites. The results, released in January 2007, indicated that contamination had returned to Mediterranean background levels except in the soil next to the plant and on the seabed in front of it. A year on, UNEP judged chronic pollution from sewage and boats a greater pressure than what the spill had left. The UN General Assembly has asked Israel, in resolutions voted from 2006, to compensate Lebanon.