Egypt launches controversial Peace Canal project canal [1997]

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak set off an explosion Thursday, launching an ambitious and controversial plan to make the Western Desert bloom with water channeled from the Nile River.

When the canal is done, if all goes according to plan, water will wind its way 190 miles (310 kilometers) across the Western Desert to irrigate 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of virgin land. And, if all goes according to plan, the newly irrigated land will be populated by hundreds of thousands of people.

The explosion Thursday was the first step in the construction on a pumping station that Egypt claims will be the largest in the world.

More important, it signals that Mubarak has bulldozed aside a decade of criticism from opposition groups, archaeologists and environmentalists who believe the project is ill-advised.

More than 60 million Egyptians live in the Nile Valley and its delta, which make up only four percent of the country's land area. The rest of the country is arid desert.

The late president Anwar Sadat conceived of the canal -- which he called the Salaam, or Peace, Canal -- years ago after Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.

Sadat hoped that by populating the mostly-uninhabited desert it would be more definably Egyptian in character. Some thought he planned eventually to sell the water to Israel, but that charge has lost credibility in recent years as relations between the two countries deteriorated.

Are we seeing Isaiah 19 being fulfilled before our very eyes?

ISAIAH 19

19 A prophecy against Egypt:

See, the Lord rides on a swift cloud
and is coming to Egypt.
The idols of Egypt tremble before him,
and the hearts of the Egyptians melt with fear.

2 “I will stir up Egyptian against Egyptian—
brother will fight against brother,
neighbor against neighbor,
city against city,
kingdom against kingdom.
3 The Egyptians will lose heart,
and I will bring their plans to nothing;
they will consult the idols and the spirits of the dead,
the mediums and the spiritists.
4 I will hand the Egyptians over
to the power of a cruel master,
and a fierce king will rule over them,”
declares the Lord, the Lord Almighty.

5 The waters of the river will dry up,
and the riverbed will be parched and dry.
6 The canals will stink;
the streams of Egypt will dwindle and dry up.
The reeds and rushes will wither,
7 also the plants along the Nile,
at the mouth of the river.
Every sown field along the Nile
will become parched, will blow away and be no more.
8 The fishermen will groan and lament,
all who cast hooks into the Nile;
those who throw nets on the water
will pine away.
9 Those who work with combed flax will despair,
the weavers of fine linen will lose hope.
10 The workers in cloth will be dejected,
and all the wage earners will be sick at heart.

11 The officials of Zoan are nothing but fools;
the wise counselors of Pharaoh give senseless advice.
How can you say to Pharaoh,
“I am one of the wise men,
a disciple of the ancient kings”?

12 Where are your wise men now?
Let them show you and make known
what the Lord Almighty
has planned against Egypt.
13 The officials of Zoan have become fools,
the leaders of Memphis are deceived;
the cornerstones of her peoples
have led Egypt astray.
14 The Lord has poured into them
a spirit of dizziness;
they make Egypt stagger in all that she does,
as a drunkard staggers around in his vomit.
15 There is nothing Egypt can do—
head or tail, palm branch or reed.

16 In that day the Egyptians will become weaklings. They will shudder with fear at the uplifted hand that the Lord Almighty raises against them. 17 And the land of Judah will bring terror to the Egyptians; everyone to whom Judah is mentioned will be terrified, because of what the Lord Almighty is planning against them.

18 In that day five cities in Egypt will speak the language of Canaan and swear allegiance to the Lord Almighty. One of them will be called the City of the Sun.[a]

19 In that day there will be an altar to the Lord in the heart of Egypt, and a monument to the Lord at its border. 20 It will be a sign and witness to the Lord Almighty in the land of Egypt. When they cry out to the Lord because of their oppressors, he will send them a savior and defender, and he will rescue them. 21 So the Lord will make himself known to the Egyptians, and in that day they will acknowledge the Lord. They will worship with sacrifices and grain offerings; they will make vows to the Lord and keep them. 22 The Lord will strike Egypt with a plague; he will strike them and heal them. They will turn to the Lord, and he will respond to their pleas and heal them.

23 In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. 24 In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing[b] on the earth. 25 The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.”

The problems with the western desert canal include the one that exists for any open canal in arid or altiplano environments — water loss is enormous. Lake Nasser has been in decline for years, and water from it is used to feed the western canal; in addition, more water than that has to go through the dynamos to pump the water for the western canal. It’s a lose-lose situation.

A feddan is slightly more than an acre.

The revival of Al Salam Canal, supposed to develop Sinai
http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/revival-al-salam-canal-supposed-develop-sinai-0

[snip] West of the Suez Canal, 200,000 feddans were cultivated and 100,000 feddans were distributed to farmers in the late 1970s... costly and disappointing results, putting it in a lineage of failed mega-projects such as Toshka... the project was initially meant to reclaim and cultivate over 600,000 feddans — 220,000 feddans to the west of the Suez Canal and 400,000 to the east. Only 125,000 feddans were reclaimed in total. [/snip]

A pipeline (or a covered channel) reduced evaporative losses; in any society, drinking and bathing needs are a pretty small fraction compared with irrigation, so societies short on freshwater — Israel’s the poster child of good water management in a desert — should take steps to reduce the evaporative losses, which can amount to more than half of the entire water supply pumped into the distribution channel. That pucker pack we use for shipping parcels and for swimming pool covers would be workable, even for something the size of Lake Nasser — assuming someone didn’t find a way to make the plastic explode. The higher the water level, the less has to be used to generate the same amount of electricity (because the distance it falls), which accelerates the rate at which the lake level rises, etc. Once it’s at its peak, irrigate to your heart’s content. :’) Same goes for those high-altitude canals that irrigated southern California into existence.

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