Tehran, Iran, December 7
By Mehdi Sepahvand - Trend:
Iran needs some $50 billion to repair its qanats, Iranian water researcher, scientist Sayyed Ahang Kowsar, has said.
He noted that the qanats are needed in order to fight shortage of water, IRNA news agency reported December 7.
He said up to the year 1980, there were 50 thousand threads of qanat in Iran, whereas now 33 thousand of them are completely dry and the rest are in bad condition.
A qanat is a gently sloping underground channel, usually stretching for several kilometers, with a series of vertical access shafts, used to transport water from an aquifer under a hill. Qanats create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates.
Kowsar said that by propagating water spreading, Iran can revive the qanats and restore underground water reserves to a normal level. He underlined that qanats can prevent flash floods by leading rainwater to underground bases.
In the latest raining in Fars Province, which led to flow of water over plains, some seven million cubic meters of water was restored thanks to qanats, he noted.
According to Kosar, Iran has over 640 thousand metric kilometers of alluvial land. Beneath 430 cubic kilometers of these lands there is coarse alluvial ground, able to store 5000 cubic kilometers of water.
This amount of water is equal to the first watering volume of all the dams built in Iran in the past 62 years and is 12 times the annual precipitation in the country.