We’ve had several rainstorms this year but it seems that they are not enough. This winter’s meager rainfall has done nothing to replenish shrinking Golan Heights streams or the mountain and coastal aquifers, and concern is growing again for the country’s water supply.
“Cute little trickles like this will not save Lake Kinneret,” Yeruham Kantman, director of the Keshet Nehusha field school in Moshav Keshet on the Golan Heights said.
You’d think that some rain is good, but quality is not enough. We need quantity as well. “It takes three days of hard rain for a strong flow, for the soil to be soaked and forthe water to wash to the streams.
“So far this year we’ve only had brief rainfalls and hence a 1 cm rise in the Kinneret. When the flow is strong the Kinneret level rises some 5 cm a day, ” explains Hillel Glazman, the head of stream monitoring for the Israel Nature and Parks Protection Authority (INPA).
The recent mix of warm and cold weather is more typical of March than February, Kantman notes.
“A proper February needs one set of rains after another and then we get a good water flow in the streams. This has not happened this year; we haven’t had to cancel a single hike in the Zavitan due to flooding. We need at least four decent rainfalls with more than 100 mm of rain each. But right now we’ve had about a third of the annual average – only 250 mm instead of 750. It’s very sad,” Kantman says.
The question remains what we are going to do? Aside from the terrible effect this will have on the area it looks like we have to start looking elsewhere like Bangkok and alternative water sources like Aquamaker.
Source: Haaretz
