A water story

This is a little illustrated story about water in Jordan.
It might as well be called "The great theft".

Now Jordan has never been a country blessed with water – over 80% of the country is more or less a desert – but until the early nineties, things were OK. There was enough to go round and projections weren't bad. Then the population grew and along came the first Gulf War – hundreds of thousands Iraqi immigrants flooded in... putting severe stress on the country's water supply and the capital Amman's waste water disposal capacities.
Since then, Jordan has been struggling to meet its water demand, especially that of its exploding capital Amman. Jordan is considered one of the five water poorest countries on earth, with an average water availability now estimated around 170 liter per person per day. The WHO designates anything under 500 liter as SEVERE water stress. So - what to do?

Water was first pumped from Azraq, an area in the eastern desert, which at the time was a huge, flourishing oasis of wetlands in the middle of a basalt desert. A major stop for migratory birds en route from Southern Africa to Asia and Europe, with abundant wildlife and - water. Now it is pretty much a basalt desert again, except for a tiny little "conservation park" funded by some international donors, who pay for water to be pumped up from underground to fill a few ponds and keep some reeds growing... it's maybe the most depressing place I've visited in Jordan. The Google Earth image below give you an idea of the place.

Then, after a peace agreement with Israel in 1994, Jordan got a share of the water from Lake Tiberias (the "Sea of Galilee") and pumped it up from the Jordan Valley (-200m) to Amman (+1000m), but that wasn't enough either. The black whole of Amman, spreading over the barren hills surrounding it at vast speed, sucked up every drop and wouldn't stop crying for more, while around half of the water that it did drink, simply disappeared - illegal connections, leakage from an old distribution system... nobody really knows.

What you see here, is the continuation of this tragedy: the story of Wadi Ma'in and Wadi Mujib - two wadis that carry water year-round (VERY rare in Jordan) to the Dead Sea. Well, they USED to...

This is Wadi Ma'in... a steep canyon, carved out by the water from a series of hot springs up on the edge of the Jordan Valley. In its lower part, as it descends to the below-sea-level Dead Sea, lush trees grow in its warm waters.

Well, and as it is about to flow down the last hundred meters to the lowest place on earth... there is an obstruction... a concrete blockage prevents it from doing just that.
The hands of the thief.

Here you see the thief running away with his booty... well, he's kind of a permanent installation, actually... and unless there are floods after a heavy winter rain (the only time when it DOES rain, actually), not a single drop will flow on into the saltiest of all seas... but instead, it is pumped along the shore of the Dead Sea to a treatment plant at its northern shore.

And we're not talking any kind of treatment plant... this is Jordan's biggest treatment and desalination plant and maybe THE most advanced treatment plant in the whole area... finished only about a year ago, with all the newest technology, fanciest equipment and best trained staff.
With what aim? Well, you can guess now...
The waters flowing down the two picturesque canyons of Wadi Ma'in and its neighbour Wadi Mujib (an even more spectacular sight by the way - also carrying a lot more water), are destined to feed the ever-thirsty capital. But before they can, they need to be treated a little...

In this picture you see a so-called Mediazur Filter, which filters the water after it's been treated biologically and before it goes to be desalinated (as it streams down the canyons, the water washes out a lot of salts from the stone - part of the reason why the Dead Sea is so salty).

"Reverse Osmosis" is what the process is called that goes on in these tubes, which are about 15-20 meters long and under a pressure of 17 bars. This will force the salt out of the water and make it potable. Well, almost...

First it needs to be "re-mineralised", because all the minerals that are so vital for us humans were pushed out with the salt in those long tubes...
This is "lime milk"... which sounds like something that might turn into a delicious Cuban cocktail... but alas, it is dissolved limestone, which returns some minerals to the water before it can be considered 'potable'.
Right, so now it's ready to feed the great capital... Well, again, not quite... because the drinking water is now about 40 km away from Amman and exactly 1279 m further downhill in elevation.

But, thank God, we have pumps... pretty huge pumps, too... each of which can pump about 2000 cubic meters of water in just one hour. My converter tells me, that's over 3.5 MILLION British pints (for my friends who still haven't adjusted to the metric system... bless your souls!). In total, this is expected to supply 38 million m³/year uphill to the capital - around 40% of its annual allocation.

"What is this?" you might ask...
Maybe it's a bit mean to put this image at the end here... but the Wadi Ma'in & Mujib treatment and desalination plant was built mostly thanks to the "American People"... and I cannot resist pointing out a certain ironic connection here... it was also those same people who voted a president into office who then waged a war on Iraq, which in turn caused Amman to overflow with refugees, but NOT with fresh water...
It did however overflow with waste water... and guess who helped finance the largest, fanciest and newest waste water treatment plant to treat Amman's sewage?
Thank you, America.


But the story doesn't end here... because Amman is STILL thirsty.
So in a few months time, another major water engineering project is going to begin, which is estimated - upon completion - to supply almost three times the amount now feeding Amman from Wadi Mujib and Ma'in. This time, it will come from even further away... from a place in the middle of another desert - more than 5 hours' driving, 325 km south of Amman at the border between Jordan and Saudi Arabia, north-east of the Red Sea town of Aqaba. There, under the hot, mountainous desert lies the Disi Aquifer - a large quantity of water that has been captured underground for more than 10 000 years and is what water experts call "fossil water", which means as much as: when it's gone... it's gone.

I'm not sure there is a moral to this story... it's just the story 'we' live with over here. And... it is the kind of story that my Master course is trying to teach us to help solve or avoid in the future.


And this is what it looks like near Disi... and what they do with the water there at the moment: