Jordan River Could Be Dead Within The Year – May 4, 2010

Environmentalists announced on Monday that the once mighty Jordan River, whose water is used by Israel, Jordan and Syria, could be dead within the year if major changes aren’t made immediately. With the three countries that share the river and its tributaries diverting 98% of its water, the scientists say that the remaining flow primarily consists of sewage, fish pond water, agricultural runoff and saline water.

According to a report by the Friends of Earth Middle East the river made famous by the baptism of Jesus has been reduced to a trickle south of the Sea of Galilee.  This is in contrast to a report by a US naval officer who led an expedition along the river in 1847.  He described navigating down cascading rapids and waterfalls along the 217 kilometre length.  The report presented in Amman Jordan two day ago concluded that “Without concrete action, the LJR (lower Jordan River) is expected to run dry at the end of 2011.”

Two kilometres south of the Sea of Galilee the river is dammed and the water diverted.  Just south of the dam, raw sewage gushes into what is left of the flow of the river.  Pointing to the sewage pipe, Gideon Bromberg, Israeli Director of Friends of the Earth, said “this is today the source of the Lower Jordan River. No one can say this is holy water. No one can say this is an acceptable state for a river this famous worldwide.”  Just a few metres away a flow of saline water that has been diverted from nearby salt springs to protect the Sea of Galilee mixes with the brown foaming mess coming out of the sewage pipe.

There are two traditional baptismal sites along the Jordan River.  The one which is accessed from the Israeli side is upriver of the dam and sewage pipe, just below the Sea of Galilee. The other, which is accessed from the Jordanian side, is 100 kilometres downstream from the sewage pipe and saline runoff.  Along that stretch of the Jordan live 340,000 Jordanians, Palestinians and Israelis in communities that dump raw sewage into the river.

There are two separate environmental issues.  Even if dumping raw waste into the Jordan River was prohibited, the problem of the salt content would remain.  Friends of Earth believes that the solution would be to release huge amounts of fresh water into the river.  This would have a secondary positive result.

The Jordan once had a flow of 1.3 billion cubic metres a year but in recent times that has been cut back to an estimated 20 million to 30 million cubic metres, which flows into the Dead Sea. The result is that the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly.

Munqeth Mehyar, Jordanian Director of Friends of the Earth said “A new study we commissioned reveals that we have lost at least 50 percent of biodiversity in and around the river due to the near total diversion of fresh water, and that some 400 million cubic metres of water annually are urgently needed to be returned to the river to bring it back to life.”

The group stated that better management could save Israel 519 million cubic metres of water a year, and the country of Jordan 305 million cubic metres.  All the countries would need to return water to the ailing river, but Israel, having diverted the largest share and being a developed nation, should return a proportionally higher percentage.

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