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The `Red-to-Dead’ plan to increase the supply of fresh water to the vanishing lake carries huge price tag and faces environmental opposition
Jul 09, 2007 04:30 AM
Oakland Ross
MIDDLE EAST BUREAU

EIN GEDI, Israel–The Dead Sea is dying, one metre a year.

From a vantage point on a roadside ridge overlooking the Dead Sea coast at the foot of the Judean Mountains, it is easy to see what is happening.

Even the earth around the lake is collapsing – a swarm of sinkholes that just keeps expanding, as ground water burrows deeper to keep pace with the descending surface of what is already the lowest point on the globe that is not covered by an ocean.

The sinkholes endanger roads, bridges, buildings, while the gradual withering away of the legendary salt-rich water body is to many minds an environmental tragedy.

“It is bad,” says Amos Bein, former director of the Geological Survey of Israel, now a private consultant. Wearing a floppy red hat against the punishing sun, he peers out across the pale-blue expanse of a vanishing sea. “At least some people consider this to be a catastrophic situation.”

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