Positive Things Do Happen in Libya

Recently I installed a time-lapse camera on my mobile phone and I have been fiddling around with it, mostly taking videos of the traffic. There is something about the flickering images that intrigues me for some reason. Today I came across a website that had time-lapse satellite imagery of different places around the world. It gave me the idea to look at the progress being made on the cleanup of a military camp in Ainzara where ordinance had been stored and to create a time-lapse video of the site.

This site is located in an area called Khamsa Shwara by the locals and is next to a residential area quite close to Tripoli University Campus B (Nasr). It's really quite alarming that so many bombs were being stored in such close proximity to the population. 

The picture below shows the amount of ordinance being stored there in July 2011.

Click on the image for a larger picture. 

NATO bombed the site in August 2011. I can honestly say that it was the most terrifying night of my life. I wrote about it in my journal which you can find here: August 2011 You can see the bomb craters that hit underground bunkers and also a large amount of unexploded missiles in the image below.

Click on the image for a larger picture.

After Tripoli was liberated I wrote a post about the site and added pictures of the damage from the bombs. You can see it here: Flashback - Unexploded Ordnance in Tripoli

After the revolution, work began to clean up the site. An independent aid organization, Handicap International, recruited and trained a team of Libyans and began diffusing and removing the missiles. They also launched educational programs to warn Libyans about the dangers of landmines, fire arms and unexploded ordnance. I posted about it here:  Making Libya a Safer Place 

Below is the latest satellite picture taken on August 8, 2014. You can really get an idea of how much progress has been made. I'm not sure why the picture is black and white.

Click on the image for a larger picture.

The images for this post and the time-lapse video I created were taken from Google Earth beginning in February 2002 and ending in August 2014. Clean up is still underway.