Parched Egypt struggles with water loss

Parched Egypt struggles with water loss

CAIRO: At the foot of an 800-year-old Cairo mausoleum, weeds rise from a murky green pool — a sign of massive loss of clean water that often goes to waste instead of reaching Egyptian consumers. Beneath intricate Quranic inscriptions, the thick shrubbery crawls upwards from waist-deep water towards the 13th-century Al-Ashraf Khalil dome in the Egyptian capital’s historic quarter. But “it’s not natural” nor the result of spring water, said heritage management expert May Al-Ibrashy.

In a country already suffering from severe water scarcity, official figures show that more than a quarter of clean water produced never makes it to consumers. Egyptians already consume slightly over half of what hydrologists consider the cut-off for water poverty at 1,000 cu m per person annually, with the United Nations warning Egypt could “run out of water by 2025”.

In several heritage sites in Cairo’s historic Al-Khalifa neighborhood which have not undergone renovation, Ibrashy’s team “tested the water, and the results are consistently that it’s drinking water mixed with sewage”. That, she told AFP, “means there’s leakage” in the massive network of pipes that serves Greater Cairo’s 20 million inhabitants.

Sunk cost

The iconic mosques and mausoleums of historic Cairo — some submerged in up to a