Salem Kheitouni had no choice but to bring water to his home through an illegal extension from the main water cistern at the artificial river heading to Tripoli through his hometown of Souk Al-Khamis, 45 km west of Tripoli.

Khaitouni said he and many of his area’s residents had no choice but to install illegal extension pipes after they were no longer able to buy water, paying no heed to the danger posed on the water network, which provides water to the entire country.

Salem Kheitouni had no choice but to bring water to his home through an illegal extension from the main water cistern at the artificial river heading to Tripoli through his hometown of Souk Al-Khamis, 45 km west of Tripoli.

Khaitouni said he and many of his area’s residents had no choice but to install illegal extension pipes after they were no longer able to buy water, paying no heed to the danger posed on the water network, which provides water to the entire country.

Water does not reach the homes of all the residents of Souk Al-Khamis since the area was only established about 15 years ago when the plans of the Artificial River Project were drawn up. Despite the fact that these plans do not cover their area, the state did not have any alternative plans for the area, which has more than 29,000 people according to the statistics of the Civil Affairs Department in Souk Al-Khamis.  

Artificial river

The story began when huge quantities of water were discovered in southeastern Libya during excavations to find oil under King Senusi. However, given the huge budget needed to extract this water from underground and pump it to the northern cities, the project was postponed.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the project started and was called the Great Artificial River. The idea was to get water from the underground wells in the south and pump it to the northern cities through huge pipes whose diameters exceed four meters. The project’s total cost reached 23.3 billion US dollars.

Five water networks were established and distributed to Libya’s main regions, which controlled the flow of water to the Libyan cities and farms. Pumping water through these networks actually started in 1993, but the problem of installing illegal extensions on the river’s pipelines in many Libyan areas was aggravated after the February Revolution in 2011.

After the revolution

Kheitouni said before the revolution they tried to install such pipes on the main line passing their areas to Tripoli, but the security forces did not allow it. Nobody dared to do it as those who damaged state possession were severely punished. Things changed after the revolution, said Kheitouni: “We managed to install extension pipes on the line,” he said.

Suleiman Abboud, Head of Media Department at the Ministry of Water Resources (MWR), said water does not reach many areas including Souk Al-Khamis because the plan did not cover these areas, which only attracted the population after launching the artificial river project in the 1980s. He also stressed that the residents believe that benefitting from the artificial river is a legitimate right as some them need drinking water and others want to establish agricultural projects.

The demands to benefit from the artificial river project came from the fact that the costs of the project were paid by the Libyan civil servants through a tax deducted from their salaries until a decision was issued by the Libyan Transitional Council to revoke it after 2011.

Many cities, towns and villages outside Tripoli buy water and transport it by car. The prices of water carried by cars range between 50 and 180 Libyan dinars (US $38 – $135) for each 30,000 liters of water, based on the areas and the availability of water in them.

Laws and fatwas

“Water sources are the ownership of the people and every individual shall preserve and use them moderately,” reads Article 2 of the Libyan Water Law No. 3 of 1983. Law 2 of 1979 of the Economic Crimes Laws punishes by imprisonment and fines “those who damage or obstruct the national production and harm the public and private facilities.”

These laws apply to those who install illegal extensions on the artificial river’s pipes. However, the MWR believes that they are not sufficient. Therefore and to deter people from stealing water, it sought to get a fatwa form the Iftaa Authority to forbid these offences. According to the MWR’s spokesperson, the Iftaa Authority issued a fatwa forbidding some cases of stealing water from the water pipelines especially in Jabal Nafousa.

Vandalism

Danger, Abboud said, lies not in the fall of water quantities but in “the destruction of the entire water network.” He cited an incident when water was cut in some areas in western Tripoli for more than seven months due to the illegal cases on the river pipelines in Al-Hasawna, south of Tripoli.

This incident, he explained, led to the loss of the production of more than one million fruit trees in the areas of Gharyan and Rayyaniya to the west of Tripoli due to the water cuts.

If water is cut in Tripoli due to an error in the network as a result of illegal extensions to the water pipelines, the repair process will require months, as spare parts cannot be provided quickly, said Abboud. He also underlined that the extensions installed by people lead to the erosion of the main line’s valves which, in turn, causes leakage of 25% of the water pumped through the pipes. Thus, the water network might collapse if these illegal extensions continue.

Kheitouni did not expect that his practices could lead to such dangerous implications, including the pollution of the water they get as it is stored in underground cisterns, which get polluted by the sewage leakage since there is no full-fledge sanitation infrastructure and the grave damage these extensions cause to the river’s main pipelines.

Grave losses

Khaled Dhabbouh, Head of Aggregation and Balance at the Artificial River Project, 20 km south of Ajdabya, said that the project runs at grave losses due to the illegal extensions. The cost of repairing the damages caused by these extensions in Ajdabya exceeded 100,000 Libyan dinars (77,000 US dollars).    

He also added that maintenance under the current conditions is very difficult. He is not only annoyed by the financial losses but also by the huge quantities of water loss during the repairs of damages which reach more than 70,000 cubic meter in every incident.

Mohamed Hajjaji, Head of the Administration of Al-Hasawna-Al Jafara Network at the same project, said the production of 160 out of 484 wells, which feed the river stopped due to illegal extensions.

The target, he added, was to provide Tripoli with two million cubic liters of water on a daily basis and provide water to the areas outside Tripoli through drilling wells, which is difficult inside the city especially in areas full of multi-story buildings. “We currently produce 1.2 million liters daily and more than 300,000 liters are lost due to installing illegal extensions on the pipelines,” he underlined.

There is, Hajjaji continued, an illegal extension every 600 meter of pipelines. These extensions are very small compared to the huge pipelines “which might explode at any moment due to the high water pressure which will cause the loss of huge quantities of water and even the total cut of water supply.”

Quick-fixes

To find a solution to this dilemma, Abboud said a committee was formed by the MWR, the Water and Sanitation Company, the Artificial River Authority and members of the municipalities. The committee reached quick fixes, which can be implemented until the infrastructure projects are finished and such transgressions are stopped.

These solutions included a proposition to open cavities in the main pipelines to provide people with drinking water and dedicating an old cistern, which is under construction, to provide western Tripoli and its homes with water. “Transporting water from this cistern to the homes would be more affordable due to the availability of water and closeness to the people’s homes,” he explained.

The solutions also included getting help from security forces to guard the main pipelines until a plan is provided by the Ministry of Agriculture. “We aspire to establish projects for treating sea water and use the river’s water in agriculture,” he stressed.

Kheitouni and the residents of his area might not be able, in light of the current situation in Libya, to benefit from the water of the project, which they paid from their salaries. Hajjaji warned that the river is estimated to last for 50 years starting from 1997 and that Libya has to prepare for the worst in terms of water afterwards.