Fao’s mayor demands area be declared “disaster area”

BASRA / IraqiNews.com: Southern Iraq’s Fao township’s Mayor has called upon its local government to announce  Fao  township, located south of Basra, as a “disaster area,” because of the high levels of its water salinity.   Walid al-Sharifi, in an interview with IraqiNews.com news agency, has “demanded the local government through official letters to declare Fao, 100 km south of Basra, a ‘disaster area,’ because of high salinity in some areas close to the Gulf that has reached to 38,000 degrees, a percentage close to the sea level.”   “The salinity in the Shatt al-Arab Waterway, just off the city of Fao has reached to 8,000 degrees. When we took water samples from the Ceyhan near the Karun and found there to be a water tap Iran has increased the percentage to that rate,” he said.   “As there is a second reason for the high salinity is the lack of releases that come from the province of Missan, which is scheduled to be 50 cubic meters per second in time that is not calling us to maintain only 37 cubic meters a fade in areas north of Basra,” he added. Sharifi stressed that “this will cause an environmental catastrophe, you’ll spend on agriculture, animal husbandry, threatens the departure of people from Faw.”   Iran informed the Iraqi government that it will transform the course of the rivers on its territory because of the scarcity of water there, according to the Iranian officials.   ”The most immediate solutions to alleviate this problem is to address the Ministry of Water Resources to increase the release of water to Basra, and the activation of the project innovation and the tube, which was scheduled to arrive to the Fao, along with the agreement with Iran on the non-diversion of streams rivers to soil drainage and divert water to Shatt al-Arab Waterway exclusively, “Sharifi concluded.   SKH (TS) 526