Israel – A team of Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian environmental scientists says large stretches of the Jordan River could dry up by 2011. And much of what remains is nothing but a canal of sewage, they said in a report released.
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“You can almost jump across this river. In other places, you don’t need to even jump – you can just cross it. It’s ankle deep,” said Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of Friends of the Earth Middle East, the organization that commissioned the report. “You struggle to see the water.”
Sadly, it is one of the efforts to save the river that has helped doom it, the report said. Israel and Jordan have agreed to stop dumping waste into the river and instead treat it in plants expected to be up and running in both countries in 2011.
But if no wastewater enters the lower Jordan – the river’s largest section – then no water will flow in it at all, the report notes.
On the Israeli-controlled side in the West Bank, the site is called Qasr al-Yahud, Arabic for “Castle of the Jews” or “Crossing of the Jews.”
The Bible describes the river, which flows south from the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea, marking the border shared by Israel, Jordan and the West Bank, as “overflowing.” In 1847, a U.S. Naval officer visiting the area reported on the “deafening roar of the tumultuous waters.”
But over the past five decades, Israel, Jordan and Syria have diverted about 98 percent of the Jordan River and its tributaries for drinking water and agricultural use. Only 700 million to about 1 billion cubic feet (20 million to 30 million cubic meters) flow through the river today, a tiny fraction of the 45 billion cubic feet (1.3 billion cubic meters) that used to surge through before the 1930s, when the first dam was built on the river in what is now Israel.
What was once the narrowest stretch of the river has now become its widest. In some spots, the Jordan is only a trickle. Otters and other creatures that used to live on its banks are long gone.
Today, the lower section of the Jordan is choked with sewage from towns on the Israeli, West Bank and Jordanian sides.
The report’s authors praised the Israeli and Jordanian wastewater treatment plan, while noting that it will dry up large stretches of the river by the end of next year because the treated sewage will be used for agriculture rather than being pumped into the Jordan.
I know a Rabbi in Flatbush for 50k he will pray for rain and fill up the river
We think that the way we see it now is the way it always was, similar to the reduced flow of Niagra Falls.
I wonder about those Dead Sea products. Like Ahava. If there is sewage in the Jordan, could it be in the Dead Sea and in their products?