The little-known 750-dunam Hadera Water Park, located between Givat Olga and the Orot Rabin Power Plant, offers Sharon residents a park that boasts a 40-meter-wide creek banked by a 1.3-kilometer-long promenade. The walkway is studded with decorative columns and pergolas and a bubbling fountain. In fact, the park is a world first - a unique hydraulic engineering project that brought dyed-in-the wool enemies - environmental activists and "serial polluters" at the coal-powered Rabin plant - together. The two sides concocted a win-win solution for the polluted Nahal Hadera (Hadera Creek) whose stench - especially at night - had for decades informed motorists on the Coastal Highway that they were halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa.
UNNATURAL SYMBIOSIS. The Orot Rabin Power Plant sits atop the 40-meter-wide creek banked by a 1.3-kilometer-long promenade.
Photo: Daniella Ashkenazy 88 224
Most river reclamation projects begin at the headwaters and work downstream. The Nahal Hadera Park put the cart before the horse, using a one-of-a-kind circulation system to rehabilitate the creek's last 1.3-km. stretch, where it meets the Mediterranean Sea. The designers siphoned off and rerouted four percent of the warm seawater expelled by the cooling system of the Orot Rabin Power Plant's giant turbines and channeled 6,000 cubic meters of warm seawater per hour through two-meter-wide pipes to a point upstream. The warmed seawater gushes out into the watercourse, "flushing" out the last section of the creek, which has been widened and had its banks reinforced.
There was no ecological conflict of interests in flushing a watercourse with seawater; the watercourse's natural gradient is so lethargic it compounds pollution in the creek. In fact, seawater naturally penetrates a full 10 km. inland - layers of sand and clay prevent it from seeping into the coastal aquifer.
The northern bank of the Hadera Park is another win-win arrangement for the greens and the Israel Electric Company (IEC). An artfully landscaped 17-meter-high escarpment stands between the watercourse and the power plant. It not only masks the plant's dull hum and shields from view most of the plant's superstructure, but also serves as a giant "ashtray."
Under a thin patina of the rust-red sandy soil that typifies the Sharon area lie the embankment's steel-gray innards - a gigantic waste dump for 620,000 cubic meters of coal ash. Until 1998, Israel simply dumped its coal ash 70 kilometers offshore, close to a million metric tons annually. Such an amount was far beyond recycling capacities of the Coal Ash Authority, established in 1993.
Back in 1978, when the power plant was chartered, the IEC was legally bound to build a park to compensate the public for the negative impact of its coal-burning power plant. Two decades went by without any progress. In the late 1990s, environmentalists joined forces with the IEC, aiming to help the plant solve its coal ash problem. The greens, for their part, sought to "borrow" the water force and heat generated in making electricity and apply it in an unheard-of manner for recreational use. Environmentalists hoped that reclaiming the mouth of the creek could help them save the rest of it. The IEC provided $4 million in backing - the lion's share of the $6m. needed to finance the first stage of the Nahal Hadera Water Park.
On the surface, construction looked like a walk in the park. But according to JNF engineer Emanuel Kaufstein, who led the project, a high water table - only 1.5 meters below the surface - made laying the pipes, not to mention stabilizing the mammoth ramp, an engineering feat he likens to "building a huge structure on margarine."
While Kaufstein is proud of his achievement, he has watched with frustration as Stage Two of the project - which was supposed to be its crowing glory - has failed to materialize.
The Hadera Water Park was supposed to deal with the power station's unmanageable quantity of coal ash in exchange for the plant providing water power to flush effluents out of the mouth of the creek. The original plan also called to create the biggest jacuzzi on the face of the earth - three giant warm water lagoons that, like the Hadera watercourse, were to be fed with warm seawater expelled by the power plant. After cooling the turbines, the temperature of the warm seawater is 10 degrees Celsius above sea temperature at any given time - allowing year-round operation of a one-of-a-kind water park that could serve as a model for others.
In Stage One, the infrastructure and the huge piping for the lagoons was laid under the channel. The complex circulation system already in place can take another six percent (10,000 cubic meters an hour) of the sea water used as a coolant by the power plant to the south bank earmarked for the three large lagoons. Because the lagoons were to be higher than the riverbed, they would have been maintenance-free - constantly replenished with warm water, emptying automatically back into the riverbed and creating three gigantic bathtub-temperature jacuzzis that would have dwarfed an average Olympic-size swimming pool.
Stage Two, which was to have been financed by commercial franchises who would operate the lagoons and other attractions, was expected to commence two years after completion of Stage One in 2002. More than halfway through 2008, there's no sign of the jacuzzis, or of the planned restaurants, riding stable, amphitheater, hiking trails and camping facilities.
According to Nurit Shtorch, deputy director of the Environmental Protection Ministry's northern district, the three lagoons "lacked any statutory anchor," meaning the plan had not been approved by the regional planning and building committee. JNF spokeswoman Michal Marmary says the jacuzzi scheme "was [changed] long ago by a new planner assigned to the project." The lagoons have disappeared from regional planning documents without a trace. Not even the ministry employee in charge of the Hadera project was aware that infrastructure for their construction existed. Chagit Golani, CEO of Hadera's Economic Development Corporation since 2005, had never heard about the lagoons, either. When pressed, park manager Yossi Turgeman said proudly that the pipes were being used to operate the Bubbling Water Fountain on the creek's southern bank. (See photo)
