While this year’s diminished snowfall and rainfall have brought forth expectations that there would be a water shortage in the summer, officials now have gone beyond that prediction and have announced that 9 major cities in the country are already in the red zone in this regard and have a shortage of water right now. Hamid-Reza Tashii, the deputy director at the national Water and Sewage Corporation (Sherkate Ab va Fazelab) told reporters, “Currently there are 9 provincial capitals comprising the cities Kerman, Bandar Abbas, Sanandaj, Tehran, Isfahan, Mashad, Shiraz, Karaj and Hamedan that are under condition red as far as their water situation is concerned requiring that residents of these cities reduce their water consumption by 20 percent.”
According to him, there has been a drop of 18 million cubic meters of water in rain and snow in the last seven years, an amount that equals to about three times the annual consumption of water in the country. At the same time another official, Jahangir Habibi, the deputy director of the state operated Corporation for the Management and Safeguarding of Water (Sherkate Hefazat va Bahrebardari) announced a sharp drop in the water reserves of the country. “In the last 40 years the water share of every person in the country stood at 7,000 cubic meters. Today this has fallen to 2,000 cubic meters but it will go even further down to 1,500 soon,” he said, adding that there was a 25 percent drop in this year’s rainfall while the water reserves of the major dams in the country were 40 percent lower than last year.
The situation is so dire that president Hassan Rouhani last week called on the public to use 10 percent less water. “Dams around Tehran are in bad condition and are filled with only 40 percent of their water capacity,” he said.
Hossein Akhani, a geology professor at Tehran University puts the blame of this shortage on the government and its affiliate companies. He said that previous administrations had allowed more wells to be dug, legalized wells that had been dug unlawfully, allowed for the construction of new dams, all without any proper planning, all of which have increased the use of water and its mismanaged use. “The government needs to have the courage to shut industrial plants that is has wrongfully allowed to operate, or it could upgrade them technically so that their water consumption drops. The government must acknowledge that it has made mistakes in this regard. There is public resistance to reducing consumption and conservation.”
Rooz online