Long queues of locals by a big tanker of water, waiting to fill whatever vessels they can get their hands on, have become a familiar scene in Matrouh, Egypt’s second largest state.

Part of this may well be due to a lack of security after the revolution; water transports, whether via pipe or otherwise, have been disrupted. However it is also true that this is nothing new – it’s just that things worsened after the revolution.

Long queues of locals by a big tanker of water, waiting to fill whatever vessels they can get their hands on, have become a familiar scene in Matrouh, Egypt’s second largest state.

Part of this may well be due to a lack of security after the revolution; water transports, whether via pipe or otherwise, have been disrupted. However it is also true that this is nothing new – it’s just that things worsened after the revolution.

“The main reason for these water problems is that this state is dependent on one single water source, the Al Hamam canal,” engineer Saeed Dabour, of the Department of Environmental Affairs, explains.

The canal is supplied with water directly from the Nile and runs for 50km along the north western coast of Egypt until it reaches a processing station at El Alamein, where it is desalinated and pumped on into other pipes that feed the rest of the state with water.

Despite a ban on using the drinking water for irrigation, the canal’s passage through the land, and in particular, through heavily cultivated land, makes violations difficult to control.

In fact, the people that live near the Al Hamam canal seem to believe that using the water however they wish is their inherent right.

“How could we let the water pass by without drinking it or irrigating our crops?” says Khamis Shantouri, a local resident.

And in fact, the locals accuse the tourist resorts on the coast of also using the drinking water illegally, for irrigation, and that local authorities are complicit in this. Local authorities deny this however.

As it is, the current issues with water in Matrouh may soon look relatively trivial compared to information recently come to light in leaked documents from local health authorities. These documents show that the water in the canal is so polluted, with both chemicals and bacteria, that it is actually not suitable for human consumption.

The information in the leaked documents was confirmed by Ibrahim Anis, Matrouh’s Director of Preventive Medicine. “Randomized samples taken from different sources in different places throughout Matrouh are polluted and do not comply with normal, sound standards of potable water” Anis says.

Asked about procedures done to verify water standards and safety as well as whose responsibility this was, the health department referred back to the local branch of Egypt’s Holding Company for Water and Wastewater (HCWW).

And here, again, the main culprit was the Al Hamam canal. A spokesperson for the HCWW in Matrouh says that the canal is the main reason drinking water is polluted as well as being an ongoing target for “water thieves”.

“No matter how hard we try to purify the water, it is already polluted from the source – the Al Hamam canal,” Wafa Mahmoud, the HCWW’s public relations manager, explains. “We’ve found dead animals in the canal water as well as animal droppings. We’ve also found a lot of empty bottles in there that used to contain agricultural poisons.”

It’s a problem of behaviour, Mahmoud says, but it also has to do with the location of the El Alamein pumping station. The station lies at the canal’s lowest point which means that there’s an accumulation of pollutants and waste here, simply because of gravity and water flows.

“There’s been a proposal to move the station around 300 to 500 metres away from this most polluted area,” Mahmoud explains. The proposal was accepted and plans are afoot to do just that.

According to Mahmoud, the biggest challenge remains trying to adapt or alter the behaviour of locals in how they treat the canal. Currently the HCWW is trying to achieve this through a campaign to raise awareness of how best to live with the canal and other waterways.