A Vital River Is Withering, and Iraq Has No Answer

The Shatt al Arab, the river that flows from the biblical site of the Garden of Eden to the Persian Gulf, has turned into an environmental and economic disaster that Iraq’s newly democratic government is almost powerless to fix.

Withered by decades of dictatorial mismanagement and then neglect, by drought and the thirst of Iraq’s neighbors, the river formed by the convergence of the Tigris and the Euphrates no longer has the strength the keep the sea at bay.

The salt water of the gulf now pushes up the Faw peninsula. Last year, for the first time in memory, it extended beyond Basra, Iraq’s biggest port city, and even Qurna, where the two rivers meet. It has ravaged fresh-water fisheries, livestock, crops and groves of date palms that once made the area famous, forcing the migration of tens of thousands of farmers.

In a land of hardship and resignation and deep faith, the disaster along the Shatt al Arab appears to some as the work of a higher power. “We can’t control what God does,” said Rashid Thajil Mutashar, the deputy director of water resources in Basra.

But man has had a hand in the river’s decline. Turkey, Syria and Iran have all harnessed the headwaters that flow into the Tigris and Euphrates and ultimately into the Shatt al Arab, leaving Iraqi officials with little to do but plead for them to release more from their modern networks of dams.

The environment problem became particularly acute last year when Iran cut the flow entirely from the Karun River, which meets the Shatt south of Basra, for 10 months. The flow resumed after the winter rains, but at a fraction of earlier levels.

In the 1980s Iran and Iraq fought over the Shatt al Arab, which forms the southernmost border between the countries and is still littered with the rusting hulks of sunken ships from that war. Now, despite improved relations after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the river has once again become a source of diplomatic tension.

“The water is from God,” said Mohammed Sadoon, a farmer and fisherman in the village of Abu Khasib, who sold two water buffaloes last year because he could no longer provide them with potable water from the Shatt. “They shouldn’t seize it from us.”

more from the NY Times

Drilling Makes Upper Delaware Most Endangered River in U.S., Group Says

Natural gas drilling in the Delaware River Basin has made the Upper Delaware River, the water source for 17 million people, the most threatened river in the United States, according to the annual report of the conservation group American Rivers. The rapid growth of hydro fracturing, or “fracking” — a drilling method used to extract natural gas from shale — poses a serious threat to the Upper Delaware and its tributaries, according to American Rivers. During hydro fracturing, drillers inject a mixture of water, chemicals, and sand at high pressure down a well bore and into the surrounding rock, creating fractures that release natural gas reserves. In its annual listing of the nation’s 10 most endangered rivers, American Rivers, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, says that not only do the chemicals used in fracking pose an environmental hazard to groundwater, but the process itself uses huge amounts of water, which then needs to be treated. The group urged tighter government control over hydro fracturing, including federal legislation that would monitor fracking under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Among the other rivers on the list is the Gauley River in West Virginia, which is threatened with pollution from mountaintop removal mining operations.


From Yale 360