According to a report on Channel 2 News in Israel, the government plans to help fill the Kineret by pumping in desalinated water from one of the numerous desalination plants on Israel’s coast. Additionally, Israel’s Water Authority also plans to remove salt water that has accumulated in the lake due to a drought that has lasted more than five years.
The Kineret provides about 10 percent of Israel’s potable water, with the rest coming from aquifers on the coast as well as underneath the mountainous regions of Judea and Samaria. In addition to meeting their own needs, Israel is committed to providing more than 50 million cubic tones of water to Jordan under the peace agreement reached by the two countries.
According to the Mako report, Israel’s Water Authority will pump water from the Eshkol desalination and filtration plant back to the Kineret. The Eshkol plant is the fourth largest water filtration plant in the world.
The whole Galilee region is under threat of not having enough drinking water due to the current supply infrastructure which relies heavily on the Kineret and on rainwater, something that has been in short supply for the past 5 years. The Kineret currently sits at 214.39 meters below sea level. The lowest it was ever recorded as being was 214.87 meters below sea level. Its maximum capacity is 208.8 meters below sea level.
(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)
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2 Responses
That’s literally a drop in the bucket. You need 4.4 BILLION gallons of water to raise the level by only one centimeter.
If desalinating water is now so easy that it can be used to refill lakes, one might ask that instead of cutting back on carbon emisions (on the theory that this will reduce global warming, even if it undermines the economy and dooms billions of people to lives of abject poverty, and inconveniences the rest), one should simply pump the increasing waters that global allegedly creating by melting glaciers and desalinate it and use it to reforest many deserts that were once forests. This helps the global economy, and if the theory turns out to be all wrong, the only side effect is a lot of trees.