The water reserve in the four dams that feed Mashhad, the second largest city in Iran, has fluctuated to less than 3 percent, local media reported on Sunday, while the country is experiencing an unprecedented drought crisis, according to Sky News.
This year, Iran is facing a drought that it has not witnessed in decades, and in Tehran the percentage of precipitation has declined to its lowest level in a century, according to a statement by a local official last October.
Media reported that 15 out of 31 Iranian provinces did not receive a single drop of rain this fall.
As a result, the water reserve in the four dams of the city of Mashhad, which has a population of 4 million people, declined to less than 3 percent, according to Hussein Ismailian, the official in charge of the city’s water corporation, to the local ISNA news agency.
The city of Mashhad is located in an arid region, 900 kilometers from Tehran, and its residents consume 700,000 cubic meters of water daily.
At the beginning of the week, the authorities estimated the water reserve in the city’s dams at forty million cubic metres, noting that the reserve at the same time last year amounted to 189 million.
Waiting for heaven
In Tehran, the situation appears to be very critical, as one of the five dams has completely dried up, while the stock in another has declined to less than 8 percent, according to the authorities.
The Director General of the Tehran Water Company, Behzad Parsa, told the IRNA news agency a week ago that the Amirkabir Dam, one of the five dams that supply the capital with drinking water, stores only 14 million cubic meters of water.
“A year ago, its capacity was about 86 million cubic meters of water,” Parsa added, attributing this sharp decline to “a 100 percent decrease in rainfall” in Tehran and its surrounding areas.
On Saturday, the authorities announced that they would ration the distribution of water at night.
Tehran is located on the southern slope of the Alborz mountain range. Summers are hot and dry, and rain often falls in the fall, while winters are snowy and harsh.
The mountain peaks were covered with snow at this time of the year, unlike now.
Shargh newspaper devoted its front page on Sunday to the water crisis in Tehran, writing, “Waiting for the sky,” while meteorologists do not expect rain in the next ten days in the capital.
On Thursday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned that the residents of the capital may be forced to leave by the end of the year if rain does not fall, without specifying the form or means of evacuation, knowing that Tehran’s population is 10 million people.
Last October, Mehr News Agency quoted an official in the water authorities as saying that “19 large dams had dried up” in Iran, equivalent to about 10 percent of the country’s stock.
