March 17, 2023
The Energy Ministry has finally started pumping water through a 36-kilometer (22-mile) tunnel and 11-kilometer (7-mile) canal to Lake Urumiyeh in an effort to keep the lake from drying up.
Officials said February 18 the tunnel linking the Little Zab River to Lake Urumiyeh had started operating on a limited scale.
Iran has spent some $200 million on the Zab tunnel project which will enable the annual transfer of some 600 million cubic meters of water to Lake Urmia once the project is completed. The Energy Ministry did not say how much water is being sent through the tunnel now.
The tunnel was supposed to have opened last year, but the opening was postponed when engineers discovered cracks in the tunnel walls. The pumping of water now is presumably to check that all the cracks were filled and the tunnel is now usable.
The Energy Ministry is also racing against the clock to finish two other projects for the transfer of nearly 200 million cubic meters of water per year to the lake from sewage treatment facilities in the cities of Tabriz and Urumiyeh.
A total of 19 projects have been designed as part of Iran’s campaign to restore Lake Urumiyeh. They are mostly behind schedule and the lake is losing volume and shrinking in size.
According to Mohammad Darvish, an environment and water expert, the lake is in a most deplorable condition.
“Despite the rise in precipitation in most catchment areas, the snow cover in the Lake Urumiyeh basin has decreased by half, falling from 85,000 square km to less than 43,000 square km,” he said, adding that it is very likely the lake will become completely dry this summer.
“The drought, which is unprecedented in the past 50 years, has led to a 50 percent reduction in water inflow from dams into the lake,” he said.