The water supply system of Bir Gifgafa, North Sinai: how Bedouin inhabitants of the village of Bir Gifgafa were relieved by water scarcity thanks to the successful environmental cooperation programme between the Governments of Egypt and Italy.
The project "Innovative Means of Increasing Water Resources in North Sinai" aimed at addressing the issue of water scarcity affecting the nomad communities living in the arid areas of North Sinai. A dual approach was adopted to identify short and long term measures to relieve the local population from water shortage.
Gifgafa is a village in the desert of North Sinai populated by 10,000 Bedouins. Each household is composed on average by 10 people other than camels and goats. The village has 6 schools, a mosque and a hospital.
Before project implementation potable water was supplied by tankers. Typically households had 2 m3/month, but the amount can be lower depending on water availability.
The new water supply system for Gifgafa was designed to supply 300 m3/d of drinking water and a similar amount of brackish water.
Raw water abstracted from one well 1,280 m deep has an average TDS of 3,000 ppm and an iron content of 3.7 mg/l. Part of raw water is treated with reverse osmosis technology for drinking purposes and then injected in the network. A separate network is used for the distribution of raw water used for ablutions, watering of vegetables, etc. Both networks deliver to 16 street taps as well to schools, hospital and mosque.
A drip irrigation system to re-use the wastewater from the water treatment plant was designed to irrigate 10 feddans of olive trees in the surroundings of the water yard.
Educational sessions were dedicated to Bedouin women on how to make the best use of fresh water now available in the village.
The integrated socio-economic model for water supply in North Sinai
The second project component addressed the issue of long-term sustainability in water resources use. The current practice of exploiting fossil water may jeopardize the rights to access to fresh water of future generations, therefore practicable alternatives must be found.
The Sinai Peninsula can potentially benefit from water coming from the river Nile, aquifers, the Mediterranean Sea and rainfalls in the elevated areas of central Sinai. Each of such options has different capital and operational costs, that were estimated by an integrated model that also considered the demographic projections and the sustainability issue.
The model showed that the exploitation of rainfalls' sub-surface run-off in the wadi El-Arish catchment turned out to be not only the most sustainable but also the least expensive option. If preliminary calculations were confirmed an estimated sub-surface volume of 250 million m3/year satisfy 20-fold the water needs of all villages in North Sinai.
The Project Partners
The project was carried out under the agreement for environmental cooperation signed by Egypt and Italy in 2003. The Project was coordinated by the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency with the financial and technical support of the Italian Ministry for the Environment Land and Sea.
Project partners also included the North Sinai Governorate, the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation and Ministry of Defense.
The project started in July 2005 and was completed in November 2008.
Loading...
15:13
A World Without Water (part 1/5)by mysticdave6662,103 views
Link to this comment:
All Comments (0)