The Sunday Times September 03, 2006
Race is on to save the Dead Sea
Robert Booth
Jordan calls in architect Foster
LORD FOSTER, the British architect, has been enlisted by the King
of Jordan for his most grandiose project yet a canal carved
through the Sinai desert to rescue the Dead Sea from environmental
disaster.
He has already held talks with the governments of Israel and Jordan
about a $3 billion (£1.57 billion) scheme to transfer water from
the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
His proposal is to carry sea water from the Gulf of Aqaba to
replenish the Dead Sea, which has shrunk by a third over the past
50 years and faces total evaporation. At stake is the areas
delicate ecology and a tourist industry that draws 100,000
Britons each year centred on the seas mineral-rich waters and
mud.
A sequence of canals and pipelines would channel sea water down
through the arid Arava valley in southern Israel and Jordan to the
salt lake at the lowest point on earth, 415 metres below sea
level.
Action is urgently needed. Over the past 50 years the Dead Seas
depth has fallen by 20 metres. The so-called Red to Dead plan is
to reverse this fall, which has been so dramatic that it has left
the Israeli spa resort of Ein Gedi a mile from the waters
edge.
Fosters intervention is the latest in a series of increasingly
ambitious schemes by the architect. Last month he revealed plans
for the 2,000ft Moscow City Tower, to cost £830m and house 25,000
people, and he is building the worlds largest new airport in
Beijing.
Now 71, he has timed his proposal to coincide with an agreement
between the leaders of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority
to spend a $15m World Bank grant on investigating the feasibility
of a canal project.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the
Palestinian president, have recently signed letters expressing
their commitment to the project, despite the conflict between
Hezbollah and Israel. The study will be financed by France,
America, the Netherlands and Japan.
It is understood that Foster has personally promoted his version of
the plan in informal meetings with senior Israeli officials over
the last 18 months, and with a presentation in Amman to
representatives of Jordans King Abdullah.
The one metre a year fall in the level of the Dead Sea has already
left the surrounding terrain unstable and prone to cave in, which
puts roads, hotels and chemical plants around the sea in jeopardy.
Oases have also been disrupted, affecting bird migrations and
desert wildlife, including ibex, gazelles and even leopards.
According to Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of Friends of the
Earth in the Middle East, the reduction has been caused by the
diversion of the River Jordan, which feeds the Dead Sea, for
irrigation and drinking water mostly by Israel, but also by
Jordan and Syria. Today, less than 7% of the rivers original flow
reaches the sea.
A river holy to half of humanity has been reduced to little more
than an open sewer, said Bromberg.
Guy Battle, Fosters environmental engineer on the project, said
this weekend that the plan includes vast desalination plants along
the canal to provide fresh water to make the desert bloom and
supply drinking water. It is hoped that these facilities, which use
the heat of the desert sun to evaporate sea water under a
translucent bubble roof, could help reduce regional disputes over
water.
Ariel Sharon, the ailing former Israeli prime minister, once called
Israels diversion of the River Jordan in 1964 the spark that led
to the six day war in 1967. Palestinians are still forbidden to
sink new wells.
Fosters office confirmed that he had completed preliminary studies
and said the firm was awaiting further instruction from the
Jordanian government.
An aide to Shimon Peres, the Israeli deputy prime minister, said:
We have had talks with the Jordanians, and they want to advance
this. King Abdullah wants it the most because most of [the
structure] would be built in Jordan.
The three-way project had the potential to boost the peace process,
said Peres.
At the northern end of the route, there would be a hydro-electric
plant.
However, Friends of the Earth warned that mixing water from the Red
Sea with the unique chemical soup of the Dead Sea could create a
natural catastrophe. The [Dead Seas] mix of bromide, potash,
magnesium and salt is like no other body of water on the planet,
said Bromberg. By bringing in the marine water, this composition
will be changed. There is concern about algae growth and we could
see the sea change from deep blue to red and brown and the
different waters could separate.