Siwa's Fatnas Lake dries up due to ‘lack of coordination’

Located 820 kilometers west of Cairo, Fatnas Lake is one of tourist places in Siwa Oasis where hundreds of tourists come to enjoy splendid sunset behind olive trees. However, tourists nowadays are deprived of seeing this spectacular scenery after the lake has dried up.

Climate change is not to be blamed for the lake drying up. Instead, the Egyptian Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation has been blamed for this “catastropic problem”, which resulted in kiling the lake’s fish and suspended tourism around its banks.

Social media users circulated photos showing that the lake’s water was pumped out, creating a hashtag “No to drying up Fatnas Lake” to put an end to this environmental catastrophe and find a solution to reclaim its touristic charm.

The problem began due to Siwa suffering from an increasing level of agricultral wastewater into the lake, and the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation placed small barriers to prevent increasing the lake water. However, due to increasing the agricultural areas and number of underground wells in the oasis over the past seven years, the water level became much higher and affected the agricultural lands surrounding the lake, said H.O., one of Siwa’s residents.

Speaking to Jusoor Post, H.O. added that farmers and land owners complained and asked to decrease the water level to avoid damaging their agricultural lands, especially date palms and olive trees, which suffer from the high salinity from the underground water.

“No coordination between the Ministry of Irrigation and the Ministry of Environment or even geologists,” said H.O., noting that ministry officials should have calculated how many cubic meters of water should have been pumped to preserve this natural reserve to which greater flamingoes migrate.

“This issue would have a negative impact on tourism in the oasis and also on workers in the tourism sector,” he said, raising questions about how the ministry would solve the problem of water salinity by mixing fresh water from deep wells with the saline water of surface wells in terms of the wide difference in the levels of water salinity.

Warning message

H.O. added that this problem raises an alarm to the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation for the need to coordinate with other concerned bodies when it comes to the 41-kilometer-long Open Canal Project under construction. The Egyptian authorities have started digging a new canal to carry out agricultural wastewater from Siwa’s major lake to the Ain al-Janabi depression east of the oasis in order to irrigate other agricultural areas and trees.

“If water that would be taken from the oasis’ major lake to serve the Egyptian Countryside Project of cultivating 1.5 million acres will be overtaken, this would be catastrophic by all means,” H.O. said.

In response, the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation said in a statement on August 9 that it is implementing several measures to develop the irrigation and drainage system in Siwa Oasis to find solutions to the problem of increased salinity in the water.

The ministry said that the oasis is suffering from excessive and arbirtary digging of underground water wells over 30 years, which led to a rise in the level of ground water in the agricultural lands.

“The ministry has started implementing a plan for developing the oasis and its bridges, wells and natural springs to maintain agricultural production. Deep wells are dug to produce fresh water from the Nubian sandstone reservoir to be mixed with the water of surface wells,” the statement added.

It noted that other underground water wells have been closed, and the development plan has reduced the water levels in some ponds and lakes of the oasis, which consequently affected the date palms and olive trees positively.

The ministry also assured that the lake would gradually be re-filled by water, adding that works are being carried out to consolidate many of the bridges of the drains in the oasis to absorb the excessive agricultural wastewater, coinciding with the completion of the work of the Open Canal Project to transfer water from these drains to the Ain al-Janabi depression.