Rishon is rolling out a groundbreaking new water conservation initiative, and hopes to become virtually self-sufficient water-wise in the next four to five years.
By MICHAEL GREENdesalination plant 248.88(photo credit: )
In 1882, when a group of 10 Ukrainian Jews from the Hovevei Zion movement traveled east to settle in the coastal plain of Ottoman-ruled Palestine, they found before them not a land flowing with milk and honey, but an arid landscape of sand dunes scattered with Arab villages. Why the early Zionists chose to settle in that particular part of the country, with its poor soil fertility and scarce water supply, is anyone's guess. But their new community, named Rishon Lezion, or "First to Zion," soon became known for agriculture and its vineyards supplied the first grapes to the Carmel Winery, now Israel's largest wine producer.
More than 120 years on, the sand dunes and Arab villages are mostly a thing of the past, but water, a problem for Rishon Lezion's founding fathers, still remains a crucial issue. Water hit the headlines in Israel this July, sparked by levels at the Kinneret, one of Israel's main sources of water, dropping to the critically low Red Line - 213 meters below sea level. If predictions of the lake hitting the Black Line, two meters lower, later this year are correct, it will no longer be possible to pump water from the lake.
"But the water crisis didn't just happen in 2008, it's here every year!" says Daniel Low, general manager of Meniv Rishon, Rishon Lezion's municipal water company. "But it has been 'discovered' in 2008 because there has been very low rainfall for the last three years."
Hoping to follow the pioneering spirit of the city's founders, present-day Rishon Lezion is rolling out a groundbreaking new water conservation initiative, aiming to be the "First in Zion" to become an "independent municipal water economy."
"The mayor [Meir Nitzan] says that water conservation is a key component of modern Zionism - and I agree," says Low. "Water is one of the principal problems this country faces in order to survive in the region, besides all of the other [security] problems that we have here."
While the waves of the Mediterranean Sea can be seen from atop the 12-story apartment blocks in Rishon's city center, the city, like the rest of Israel, remains partly reliant on water supplied by the National Water Carrier, some of which comes from the Kinneret, over 130 kilometers to the north. The city of over 240,000 people currently supplies 70 percent of its water from a network of 11 local wells, and buys the rest of its water from Mekorot, the national water authority. By switching to sources closer to home, Israel's fourth-largest city hopes to become virtually self-sufficient water-wise in the next four to five years.
Israel's dire hydrological predicament may have hit headlines in 2008, but water conservation has been on the city's agenda since 2001, when Nitzan announced his vision for the city's water policy. The mayor's portrait, emblazoned on billboards around the city, is hard to miss in the run-up to the November municipal elections, and Meniv Rishon is tasked with delivering Nitzan's ambitious vision. The mayor's plan consists of three key elements: a desalination plant, rainwater harvesting and wastewater treatment.
The winner of the tender to build the desalination plant, which will make saline water from four new wells drinkable, will be announced on October 5. "If everything is almost okay, and in Israel nothing is ever completely okay, the plant will be activated at the start of 2010."
The plant, to be located 12 km. from the sea, is planned to produce 3.7 million cubic meters of high-quality water in the first stage of operation, a figure predicted to rise eventually to 11 million cubic meters. It will be fed with water from four new wells to be drilled at Rishon Lezion beach, as well as breathing new life into eight existing wells in the area which cannot currently be used for drinking water. "We have 19 wells in Rishon, but only 11 are working because the rest are polluted with nitrates," explains Low, adding that aerating the water together, at a ratio of one part desalinated water to two parts well water, will produce "excellent quality water."
Desalination is often considered an expensive option for water conservation, partly due to the high cost of energy needed to power the process. The construction of the plant itself, at NIS 80 million, doesn't come cheap either, but Low maintains that citizens will be better off in the long run. "The cost of water in Rishon will go down. That's one of the principal targets in the long-run: to make water cheaper for people." Low says that the high cost of desalinated water, which he estimates at 92 cents per cubic meter, will be offset by the much lower cost of the well water - about a third of that. The predicted cost to the consumer in Rishon will be between 40 to 45 cents per cubic meter, compared to Mekorot's current price of 80 cents, a value predicted to rise in 2009. The cost of the desalination plant and other infrastructure will be funded by Meniv Rishon's financial investments.
Taking in the view from Low's second-floor office, one could be forgiven for thinking that Israel's latest water crisis is a thing of the past. The landscaped gardens below and the rows of palm trees decorating Meniv Rishon's office complex represent a surprisingly green environment for a city spearheading water conservation. But the gardens in question are prevented from wilting in the merciless heat courtesy of a 16-km-long pipe that transports rainwater collected in a nearby reservoir to municipal parks and gardens in the northwestern part of the city. The pipe, which has been operational for a year, represents the second element of Nitzan's vision for water self-sufficiency: harvesting as much water as possible from the sky.
"One thing unique to the city of Rishon Lezion is that we collect rainwater to infiltrate into the aquifer," says Low, adding that the scheme has added 11 million cubic meters into the local groundwater aquifer since it was initiated in 1999. Rain is currently collected in the Superland Lake (named after the adjacent amusement park) and then pumped into the nearby Nakik Lake, from where it filters down into the aquifer. The new pipe, which cost NIS 14.5 million, pumps rainwater from the lakes into city parks and flower beds.
"The purpose is to use the water we collect to irrigate all of the [public] gardens that belong to the municipality. This has already saved 1.2 million cubic meters that we used to buy from Mekorot, representing a financial saving of NIS 4.5 million," explains Low, adding that rainwater harvesting only takes place in the northwestern part of the city, where the purple color of metal pipes sprouting among the red, yellow and green flora of the roadside flower beds, indicates that the water they contain comes directly from the clouds - and not the Kinneret.
Although Israel is considered an arid country, some parts of it - such as Jerusalem - receive more annual rain on average than Berlin. The problem is that, like traffic during rush hour, it all comes at once, meaning that much is lost to run-off that escapes into rivers and the sea. Over 90% of Tel Aviv's 530 mm annual precipitation falls between November and March. "We're still losing millions of cubic meters each year to run-off," complains Low. "We want to collect water across the entire city, not just in the northwest."
To do this, Meniv Rishon plans to construct two lakes to collect run-off in the northeast and southeast of the city. "We've been dealing with the project for four years… It's really crazy," says Low, adding that to build the collection lakes, the company has to receive permits from a maze of government authorities including the Environmental Protection and Health ministries and the Water Authority. Discussions over the southern lake were held up for eight months before the Agriculture Ministry finally approved it. Low believes that it will take another four or five years, "speaking optimistically," before the two new lakes are operational, which will come with a price tag of NIS 40-50 million.
Red tape has also been an obstacle for the third component of the city's plan for water independence - wastewater treatment. "We want to use recycled water to supply to the agricultural part of the city in the east and southeast. Today, [agriculture] is not working because it's not commercially viable; the returns are too low and the cost of water is too high," says Low. "We want to develop modern agriculture which can be profitable." Low acknowledges that agriculture in modern Rishon Lezion is "almost non-existent," currently confined to the city's outskirts, where the buffer of sand dunes between the city and the coast serve as a reminder of what the terrain was like for the city's founding fathers, before being overtaken by highways and the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv and Ramat Gan that now shimmer on the not-so-distant horizon.
However, plans proposed in 2002 to build a wastewater treatment plant have progressed even more slowly than the planned reservoirs. "Why not? It's a very political question - and a national question too," believes Low. Among Rishon's neighbors is Shafdan, the Dan Region Wastewater Treatment Plant, which purifies around 130 million cubic meters of waste water each year that are then sent for use in agriculture in southern Israel. If the city were to divert its own sewage to irrigate local agriculture, Shafdan would lose around 10% of its supply, with obvious consequences for farming in the arid Negev region. Low says that the Water Authority has been "enthusiastic" about Meniv Rishon's projects, although the same cannot be said for other government institutions. "We go to the authorities with all these projects and they say, 'Hold your horses,'" insists Low. "It's one thing to know that you have to take action, but it's something else to actually do it."
A spokeswoman for Mekorot said the government-owned company was unable to comment on the Rishon Lezion initiative because it has no official say over water policy, which remains the responsibility of the Water Authority. But Water Authority spokesman Uri Shor said that in principle, Rishon's scheme is "fantastic."
"From our point of view, we're for it if it will increase the amount of potable water all over the country. There is a lack of water in Israel and we need more." However, Shor stressed that such decisions must be made locally and the Water Authority wasn't actively encouraging other cities to follow suit. "The Water Authority can't go to a city and say: 'You must start desalinating water.' The initiative must come from local authorities; they need to check whether it's economically viable. If Rishon Lezion thinks it can produce desalinated water cheaper than water from the national system, then they'll go for it," says Shor. "They want to become [an] independent [water economy] not because they want to be independent of water, but because they want to lower the cost of water."
However, he points out, the city will never be "completely independent." "Water can't be produced without checks from the Authority and the Health Ministry. It's not just about water. When you produce water, it produces sewage - and where does that go? You can't just disconnect [from the national system]."
Prof. Alon Tal of the Jacob Blaustein Institute of Desert Research at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is also ambivalent toward localities choosing to "opt out" of the national water system. He believes that initiatives like the one in Rishon Lezion represent a "national trend toward privatization" in Israel. "In the new Zionist state, the priority was water for agriculture, but as agriculture loses its prestige and government support and the country become more egoistic, more concerned with the individual rather than the collective, people are starting to say 'We can do it ourselves,'" argues Tal, who received a Lifetime Achievement Award for Environmental Protection from the Environmental Protection Ministry in September. "We need to be wary of the implications.
"Access to water is a fundamental human right and we have to be careful that in the search for improved efficiency, which is a good thing, we don't lose the infrastructure needed to provide services to the entire population. I'm not saying that it should be opposed. As an environmentalist, I believe that we need to find new ways to create more water sources for nature, for agriculture and for the peace process; I'm all for that. But with the National Water Carrier people pay the same amount whether they live right next to it or are on the other side of the country and I don't want to lose that," Tal insists.
Nevertheless, Meniv Rishon is confident that its scheme will be a success and predicts that within five years, once the new desalination plant and reservoirs are up and running, the city will hit its target of being 100% water self-sufficient. The overall demand for water in Rishon Lezion has fallen recently, which Low attributes to the rising price of water in Israel, increased public awareness of the need to conserve water, and the Water Authority's recent PR campaigns about saving water. A campaign encouraging local residents to be more water-conscious is underway, but if the sprinklers bursting into action at 1 p.m. in a city park opposite the central bus station are anything to go by, it's not just public attitudes that need changing. Whether harvested from rain or from the Kinneret, it's debatable how effective the jets of water will be in quenching the thirst of the yellowing grass, as the midday sun evaporates the precious liquid.
If the water conservation message is still filtering down in Rishon itself, it has already begun to spread to other parts of the country. Nazareth, in Israel's North, has sought advice from Meniv Rishon about collecting rain locally, as well as Italy, the Ukraine, drought-stricken Australia and even tropical Brazil. But first and foremost comes the environment in Israel itself: "We want the population of Rishon Lezion to use water with wisdom," says Low.
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