"An experimental pumping of water from the wells of the Disi aquifer will start at midnight (2100 GMT) Wednesday," Water Minister Hazem Nasser told the state-run Petra news agency.
The much-awaited $990 million project seeks to extract 100 million cubic metres (3.5 billion cubic feet) of water a year from the Disi aquifer, 325 kilometres (200 miles) south of Amman.
The water ministry says Jordan, where 92 percent of the land is desert, will need 1.6 billion cubic metres of water a year to meet its requirements by 2015, while the population of 6.8 million is growing by almost 3.5 percent a year.
"The pumping will contribute to solving Amman's water problems in a week, while other cities will start witnessing improvement in water supplies within a month," Nasser said.
Officials say the project has required 250,000 tonnes of steel and the digging of 55 wells to pump water from Disi to Amman, where the per capita daily consumption of its 2.2 million population is 160 litres (42 gallons)...
A tomb near Petra, Jordan, shot by Jean Housen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic license
No comments:
Post a Comment