The Sunday Times; September 03, 2006

Race is on to save the Dead Sea
Robert Booth

Jordan calls in architect Foster
LORD FOSTER, the British architect, has been enlisted by the King of Jordan for his most grandiose project yet — a canal carved through the Sinai desert to rescue the Dead Sea from environmental disaster.
He has already held talks with the governments of Israel and Jordan about a $3 billion (£1.57 billion) scheme to transfer water from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea.
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His proposal is to carry sea water from the Gulf of Aqaba to replenish the Dead Sea, which has shrunk by a third over the past 50 years and faces total evaporation. At stake is the area’s delicate ecology and a tourist industry — that draws 100,000 Britons each year — centred on the sea’s mineral-rich waters and mud.
A sequence of canals and pipelines would channel sea water down through the arid Arava valley in southern Israel and Jordan to the salt lake at the lowest point on earth, 415 metres below sea level.
Action is urgently needed. Over the past 50 years the Dead Sea’s depth has fallen by 20 metres. The so-called “Red to Dead” plan is to reverse this fall, which has been so dramatic that it has left the Israeli spa resort of Ein Gedi a mile from the water’s edge.
Foster’s intervention is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious schemes by the architect. Last month he revealed plans for the 2,000ft Moscow City Tower, to cost £830m and house 25,000 people, and he is building the world’s largest new airport in Beijing.
Now 71, he has timed his proposal to coincide with an agreement between the leaders of Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian Authority to spend a $15m World Bank grant on investigating the feasibility of a canal project.
Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, have recently signed letters expressing their commitment to the project, despite the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. The study will be financed by France, America, the Netherlands and Japan.
It is understood that Foster has personally promoted his version of the plan in informal meetings with senior Israeli officials over the last 18 months, and with a presentation in Amman to representatives of Jordan’s King Abdullah.
The one metre a year fall in the level of the Dead Sea has already left the surrounding terrain unstable and prone to cave in, which puts roads, hotels and chemical plants around the sea in jeopardy. Oases have also been disrupted, affecting bird migrations and desert wildlife, including ibex, gazelles and even leopards.
According to Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of Friends of the Earth in the Middle East, the reduction has been caused by the diversion of the River Jordan, which feeds the Dead Sea, for irrigation and drinking water — mostly by Israel, but also by Jordan and Syria. Today, less than 7% of the river’s original flow reaches the sea.
“A river holy to half of humanity has been reduced to little more than an open sewer,” said Bromberg.
Guy Battle, Foster’s environmental engineer on the project, said this weekend that the plan includes vast desalination plants along the canal to provide fresh water to make the desert bloom and supply drinking water. It is hoped that these facilities, which use the heat of the desert sun to evaporate sea water under a translucent bubble roof, could help reduce regional disputes over water.
Ariel Sharon, the ailing former Israeli prime minister, once called Israel’s diversion of the River Jordan in 1964 the spark that led to the six day war in 1967. Palestinians are still forbidden to sink new wells.
Foster’s office confirmed that he had completed preliminary studies and said the firm was awaiting further instruction from the Jordanian government.
An aide to Shimon Peres, the Israeli deputy prime minister, said: “We have had talks with the Jordanians, and they want to advance this. King Abdullah wants it the most because most of [the structure] would be built in Jordan.”
The three-way project had the potential to boost the peace process, said Peres.
At the northern end of the route, there would be a hydro-electric plant.
However, Friends of the Earth warned that mixing water from the Red Sea with the unique chemical soup of the Dead Sea could create a natural catastrophe. “The [Dead Sea’s] mix of bromide, potash, magnesium and salt is like no other body of water on the planet,” said Bromberg. “By bringing in the marine water, this composition will be changed. There is concern about algae growth and we could see the sea change from deep blue to red and brown and the different waters could separate.”