The Jordan River, where Jesus was reportedly baptized, is now just an extra-large toilet.

Jordan River threatened by dams and sewage
By Ibon Villelabeitia, Fri Jun 24, 9:08 AM ET
Reuters

The Jordan River, where Christians believe Jesus was baptized, is heavily polluted with sewage and is in danger of drying up after decades of conflict and intense agricultural use, environmentalists said on Friday.

In the early 1960s, the Jordan moved 1.3 billion cubic meters (46 billion cu ft) of water every year from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea.

But dams, canals and pumping stations built by Israel, Jordan and Syria to divert water for crops and drinking have reduced the flow by more than 90 percent to about 100 million cubic meters (3.5 billion cu ft).

"The Jordan River will disappear if nothing is done soon. More than half of it is raw sewage and runoff water from agriculture. What keeps the river flowing today is sewage," Munqeth Mehyar, chairman of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), an Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian group, told Reuters.

Almost all the tributaries that feed into the river have been dammed or diverted, turning the Jordan — believed to have been the gateway to the Garden of Eden — into an insalubrious stream in some parts, especially in summer.

In the 1950s, Israel built a pipeline to pump water out of the Sea of Galilee, stopping its flow into the Jordan, said Bromberg, speaking by telephone from Tel Aviv.

Jordan then constructed a canal in the 1970s to divert water out of the Yarmuk River, a main tributary of the Jordan, to water its farmland, said Mehyar, a Jordanian.

A dam being built by Jordan and Syria on the Yarmuk will cut off all its flow into the Jordan, they said.

Pollution does not seem to bother the pilgrims who come from around the world to the river's fabled banks to fill souvenir bottles with muddy water.

In the baptismal site of Bethany Beyond the Jordan, on the Jordanian side, officials have built pools where treated water is pumped to allow pilgrims to bathe in cleaner waters.

But some risk-takers dip in the greenish river itself.

"It is a health hazard. People should not be allowed to dip in the river. It is anything but holy water," said Bromberg.

He said half of Israel's fresh water is used for agriculture. "We are not asking governments to put all the water back but to strike a better balance between water resources and the ecological and historical importance of the river," he said.