| "The length of the lake is 67 miles, measured from Zoar in Arabia, the width is 17. Next to it lies the land of Sodom, once so rich in crops and in the wealth of its cities, but now dust and ashes." - Josephus Flavius - "The Jewish War", |
The Dead Sea’s shoreline is sinking by a meter a year, and it is feared that it will literally ”dry up” by the year 2050 – unless immediate efforts are made to save what many are calling one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. While the facts are well known, experts are divided regarding a solution as to how to save the “lowest point on earth.”
One of the main ideas being forwarded to stabilize the water level of the Dead Sea is the much-heralded, yet controversial, Red-Dead Sea Conveyance Project, which involves digging a canal and a series of water pipeline conduits 160 kilometers from the Gulf of Akaba to a location on the salt lake’s southern perimeter in order to bring between 1,000 and 2,000 MCM (million cubic meters) of water annually to replenish and stabilize its water level.
Continue reading “Raising the dead” »
A jetty that used to reach into the water stuck out in midair on the Dead Sea’s north shore near Kalia.
Early on a recent weekday morning, three busloads of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women from Jerusalem debarked at a private beach near this tiny Israeli settlement along the Dead Sea shore. They filed down a series of wooden walkways and steps — which are constantly being extended as the waters recede — that protect visitors from the slippery newly exposed mud. Finally, they lowered themselves into the strangely buoyant water with a gentle plop.
By evening, it was the turn of the ultra-Orthodox men, while an adjacent beach was full of young Palestinians from the West Bank.
The Dead Sea has long drawn visitors for its uniqueness — its surface is now about nearly 1,400 feet below sea level, making these beaches the lowest dry points on earth. The north part, in territory that Israel conquered in the 1967 Middle East war, is popular with Israelis, Christian pilgrims and tourists from Jerusalem. And in the year since Israel eased travel restrictions in the West Bank, removing some major roadblocks, Palestinians are also able to reach the northern shores.
In another point of convergence, the governments of Israel, Jordan, which lies across the water, and the Palestinian Authority have joined in a bid to promote the Dead Sea in an Internet competition to be voted one of the new seven natural wonders of the world.
The governments of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority have joined in a bid to promote the Dead Sea in an Internet competition to be voted one of the new seven natural wonders of the world.
With the water level now dropping by more than three feet a year, many here hope that the competition will focus attention on ways to restore the waters.
“We chase after the water with steps,” said Yusef Matari, a lifeguard at the private beach, Neve Midbar, or Desert Oasis. Mr. Matari has been working in the area for 20 years. “It changes every month,” he said. “There is no permanent shore.”
Some of the ultra-Orthodox women kept on long robes, adhering to strict religious codes of modesty, although Mr. Matari, perched in his lifeguard’s hut on a slope high above the current water line, was the only man in sight.
At nearby Kalia beach, the managers have been trying to encourage more young people to come down for parties by renovating the beach bar, and promoting it as the lowest watering hole in the world.
Dahani Utseh, 35, paddled in the salt-thickened water. She had come with her brother-in-law and her small daughter from Nablus, in the northern West Bank. It was her first time.
While the Palestinians claim about 25 miles of shoreline that lie in the West Bank as part of a future state, Aviv Cohen, a site manager who lives at the settlement, said the negotiations were not his business. The settlement, which is a small kibbutz, or communal farm, is investing heavily, with plans to build a restaurant and a visitors center, he said.
Khalil Tufakji, a Palestinian geographer, said the Palestinians also have more distant plans to build hotels and health spas.
But at this place, where heaven and earth are farthest apart, the challenges that pit people against nature are particularly stark.
The water level has been dropping steeply since the 1960s, mainly as a result of Israel, Jordan and Syria diverting almost all the waters of the Jordan River, which used to feed the Dead Sea, for domestic use and agriculture. Potash industries on both the Israeli and Jordanian sides of the lake also play a significant role in depleting the Dead Sea, since the extraction process relies heavily on evaporation ponds. The southern basin, where the industries and the Israeli hotel district are located, was always shallow. Now it would be completely dried out were it not for the industrial evaporation pools, whose water is artificially pumped in from the northern part.
One proposed solution is to construct a water conduit from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, which would generate hydroelectricity and provide desalinated water, primarily to Jordan, which is acutely short of water, and also help refill the Dead Sea. The governments of Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority agreed to a World Bank-sponsored feasibility study that has begun.
Environmentalists are concerned, however, about the potential impact of the project, warning, among other things, that mixing the waters could result in an algae bloom that could give the Dead Sea a reddish hue. Alternatively, a coat of white gypsum could form on the top. They argue that the study is being rushed, with results due in 2011.
“It is our governments, our politicians, who want a quick decision,” said Gidon Bromberg, director of the Israeli branch of Friends of the Earth Middle East, a regional environmental group.
His group is calling instead for the rehabilitation of the Lower Jordan River through drastic changes in water management. But that may be difficult in a thirsty region where the agricultural lobbies are strong.
“They do not like to hear about water reform,” said Munqeth Mehyar, the director of Friends of the Earth Middle East’s Jordanian branch, speaking by telephone from Amman.
Contrary to popular wisdom, the Dead Sea will not entirely disappear. It could drop another 300 feet or so from its current maximum depth of 1,240 feet over the next hundred years, according to Ittai Gavrieli, director of the Geological Survey of Israel, a government body. Then, he said, evaporation would slow down as the surface area shrank, and the water level would stabilize.
In the meantime, at Kalia beach, a jetty that used to reach into the water sticks out in midair. Farther south, “Danger of Drowning” signs dot the desert, warning against unauthorized bathing when there is no water in sight. But the drying up of the Dead Sea has brought another hazard: sinkholes, some large enough to swallow a car, that suddenly open up in the sand.
Rina Roth, one of the ultra-Orthodox bathers, blamed the relatively harmless cosmetics industry that makes products from Dead Sea minerals and mud.
“God gave it to us as a present. It is for future generations,” she said of the lake. “They should stop with all the cosmetics and leave it as God made it.”
Dead Sea - Report due for release
Meanwhile, the best available data reports for the modelling studies of the Red Sea and the Dead Sea have been completed as scheduled and are currently being examined by stakeholders.
“The best available data reports were received on time from the two consulting firms and are now under review and comment by the three governments, the panel of experts and the World Bank,” McPhail, a water and sanitation specialist, said in a statement sen via e-mail on Monday.
The Red Sea Modelling Study explores the impact of the Red-Dead project on the physical, chemical and biological make-up of the Red Sea, including concerns over possible effects on coral reefs and marine life.
The Dead Sea Modelling Study examines the impact of the scheme on the Dead Sea, its surroundings and water quality, according to the World Bank.
“Once we have the final report, it will be posted on the website. Until we have a final version of a report, we cannot discuss what they say,” McPhail underscored.
The Red-Dead project seeks to halt the continuous decline of the Dead Sea and provide potable water to Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and Israel.
The final feasibility report of the Red-Dead project will be ready in May next year, while the Environmental and Social Assessment is expected in October 2011, World Bank consultants said previously.
One of the world’s most sacred rivers has become an unholy mess, and could cease to exist by 2011, according to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental NGO. The lower Jordan River, immortalized in the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was once a rapid, swelling waterway filled with fish and flanked by willow and poplar trees, flowing south from the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea.
Today, a brownish, foul-smelling stream trickles along where 1.3 billion cubic metres used to annually gush. “No one can say this is holy water,” Gidon Brom berg, FoEME’s Israeli co-director, recently told a group of reporters visiting the site. The Jordan River, along with the Dead Sea and Mountain Aquifer, are at the top of FoEME’s political agenda. Speaking quite literally, Bromberg added, “The Jordan River has become holy s–t.”
The lower Jordan River is filled with raw sewage and contaminated agricultural runoff from neighbouring communities in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan. Israeli settlements channel the sewage from around 30,000 toilets; roughly 60,000 Palestinians—who lack a sewage treatment network altogether—dump raw sewage in landfills, which eventually leaks out into the Jordan; and sewage wells utilized by some 250,000 Jordanians also leak into the river. On top of this, the river’s salinity levels are dangerously high.
These serious pollutants have eroded the Jordan’s biodiversity, while its flow has been dramatically reduced by water infrastructure projects. Over time, Israel and Jordan have diverted and blocked almost all water flowing from the Yarmouk River and the Galilee Sea, reducing the Jordan to just two per cent of its natural flow. It is now little more than a slowly moving sewage canal. New waste-water treatment plants are being built by Israel and Jordan that will treat incoming sewage and saline water and repurpose it for agricultural use. Ironically, once these plants are operating, little to no water will flow into the river at all, putting the once-mighty Jordan at risk of drying up entirely.
A study FoEME released in May 2010 recommends that 400 million cubic metres (m3) of fresh water—approximately a third of the historic flow—be returned to the river annually via donations from the governments that the Jordan River and its tributaries affect. That proposed 400 million m3 breaks down to 220 million m3 from Israel, 100 million m3 by Syria and 90 million m3 by Jordan. Brom berg states that the Palestinians, who are denied access to the river, have no obligation to donate.
At this point, all sides have given verbal support for the rehabilitation of the river, and the Israeli Water Authority has pledged 20 million m3, falling short of FoEME’s recommendations but still going further than any other government. The Israeli environment ministry has also launched a study on the rehabilitation of the river, but only where it flows between the Galilee Sea and the Green Line dividing Israel and the West Bank. Jordan and Syria have not committed. But, Bromberg notes, international development groups are starting to help with the cleanup process. The Japan International Co-operation Agency is currently mulling the feasibility of a plan for an agro-industrial park in Jericho, which would treat sewage and waste water from the Jordan.
Aaron Wolf, professor of geography at Oregon State University and author of Hydropolitics Along the Jordan River, credits FoEME with helping to put water on the regional agenda, but raises the question of water scarcity: “Technically, it’s feasible. The question is simply priorities. In Amman, they get drinking water once a week. You could see somebody arguing that drinking water in Amman is more of a priority than in-stream flow in the Jordan, recognizing that anything that’s in the Jordan ends up in the Dead Sea so it’s not usable for human use.”
But while FoEME’s recommendations trickle onto the desks of the necessary decision-makers (Jordan’s Queen Rania recently requested to see the report for herself), its grassroots engagement has taken hold. Thousands of residents have participated in FoEME environmental awareness projects in Palestinian, Israeli and Jordanian communities in the Jordan River valley. Mayors and citizens have even shown their support by (inadvisably) jumping into the river together. “We remain optimistic as we see real progress on the ground as per sewage removal,” says Bromberg. “And more and more international interest helps to create the political will locally to return fresh water to the river.”
Turkish trenches at the Dead Sea December 1917
Dead Sea Ecological Disaster
What’s floating in the Dead Sea?
East Jerusalem’s sewage is flushed into the Dead Sea as city fails to agree on waste treatment.
By Matt Beynon Rees – GlobalPost
Published: June 27, 2010 06:53 ET in Middle East
JERUSALEM — If you’ve ever slathered your skin in the healing, mineral-rich mud of the Dead Sea, you may want to stop reading now.
More than 8 million gallons of sewage from East Jerusalem is pumped downhill to the Dead Sea, raw and untreated, every day. That’s not just a little icky for those of us who like to float in the lowest body of water on earth. It’s also an environmental catastrophe, and potentially another flashpoint in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
“It’s the greatest environmental hazard in the country,” said Naomi Tzur, Jerusalem’s deputy mayor, who heads the planning and environmental committees on the city council. “I don’t sleep easily at night knowing that this is happening.”
The Dead Sea is one of the contenders to be named among the Seven Natural Wonders of the World in an online poll that organizers estimate will draw a billion voters by the time results are announced next year. But its location also puts it in the firing line of a conflict almost as bitter as the sea’s highly saline water.
In 1993, the German government offered to finance a sewage-treatment plant for East Jerusalem. The plant was to be run jointly by Israel and the Palestinian Authority, which was founded that year as part of the Oslo Accords. The Palestinians refused to accept a joint project because they didn’t want to recognize any Israeli authority over the territory occupied since 1967.
So while West Jerusalem has state of the art sewage facilities, the effluent of Palestinians living east of the pre-1967 border has nowhere to go but down to the Dead Sea. In a city of about 800,000 people, 32 percent of the population is essentially tipping the contents of their toilets, showers and kitchen appliances directly into the Dead Sea.
Tzur’s Planning Committee met last week to examine alternative ways to dispose the sewage. One option would be to pump the it across town to process it in the West Jerusalem waste station. But Tzur, who isn’t allied with any Israeli political party, rejected the idea because it would take from the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem the ability to reuse their wastewater.
In a desert region where water is, to say the least, scarce, that represents a considerable resource that’d be lost to the Palestinians — even if its only current use is to buoy unsuspecting tourists at the resort hotels of the Jordan Valley.
The committee decided to examine the possibility of starting “preliminary purification” of the water, but added that it wouldn’t go any further until it had Palestinian agreement.
Urban planning is often fraught in Jerusalem because any development, no matter how small, is always considered in the wider context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The hot issue now is a city plan to demolish 22 Palestinian homes in a neighborhood called al-Bustan, which is just down the hill from the Western Wall plaza, where Jews pray, and is overlooked by the gray dome of the Aqsa Mosque.
City officials said they want to make room for an “archeological park.” But Palestinians think the plan is intended to push Palestinians out of the “holy basin,” which is how planners refer to the portion of the biblical Kidron Valley that winds away from the Old City toward the Dead Sea.
An Israeli group opposed to the project, Ir Amim (Hebrew for “City of Peoples”), said the true intent of the development is to hand over the area to a group of Israelis who have previously settled in predominantly Palestinian areas of Jerusalem, thus cementing Israel’s hold on the place and making it harder to divide the city in potential peace talks.
“It’s clear this Bustan area will be given to the settlers who have their own agenda for Jerusalem,” said Yudith Oppenheimer, executive director of Ir Amim, an organization dedicated to equality between the different religious and national communities in Jerusalem.
Tzur, however, said that many of the homes due for demolition are “illegal”, threatened by annual flooding and built in a way that they can’t be connected to the city’s sewage system.
In the holy basin, the environment these days is just as unwholesome as the sewage flowing down into the Dead Sea.
John Sekulow and Graham Lubin holding the banner.
Floating protest tries to save Dead Sea
By EHUD ZION WALDOKS – Jerusalem Post
17/05/2010 05:18
Save Our Sea, a new grassroots organization, plans to hold a floating session and concert at the Dead Sea to raise awareness about its dire state.
It’s not a political campaign, it’s not a tourist gimmick – it’s a heartfelt plea by some of the people who visit the Dead Sea every year.
On Thursday, Save Our Sea, a new grassroots organization, plans to hold a floating session and concert at the Dead Sea to raise awareness about its dire state.
The Dead Sea drops about a meter a year and will eventually settle into a dense mass of mostly salt in the next 50 years if nothing is done to save it. Plans are being examined, like the Red-Dead Canal, to bring sea water to the Dead Sea.
But Save Our Sea is not about politics, one of the three founders, Graham Lubin, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday. The other two are former San Franciscan John Sekulow and Israeli environmental activist Ayelet Ofek.
“We are trying to make a human point, not a political point. Thousands come to the sea for health reasons, and there’s a lot of passion about its demise,” Lubin said.
So this Thursday at the Ein Bokek beach (next to the hotels) at 4:30 p.m., Lubin and his two friends hope people will come down for a solidarity float in the sea. It’ll be followed that evening by a free concert, according to Lubin. It will be the organization’s first event.
“The three of us started it. We wanted to demonstrate how much people who use the Dead Sea love the Dead Sea. It’s not a political thing,” Lubin told the Post.
“It always amazes me that we’ve got this amazing body of water, which is used by industry, for tourism, and healing. Yet [the people who visit] seem to be oblivious to what is going on, or they just don’t care,” he said with dismay.
Lubin himself is a long time fan of the sea.
“I’ve been coming down here for 27 years, and if something is not done in 30 to 50 years, it could disappear. So we’re trying to raise awareness,” he said. “We want to demonstrate how much people who come down here really do care about it passionately and want something done so that future generations can use it and see it and enjoy it.”
Sekulow made aliya recently, partly to take advantage of the Dead Sea’s healing waters, according to Lubin.
While eschewing political statements, Lubin limited himself to one.
“It pains me that under Israel’s stewardship, it’s been allowed to fade and dwindle,” he said. “Only now that we have a real crisis are things being done. We still don’t know if or when any of this is going to happen. It really is an awful situation to be watching.”
