Tehran’s main source of drinking water is at risk of running out within two weeks, state media warned on Sunday, due to a historic drought.
The Amir Kabir dam, one of the five that supply drinking water to the capital, “contains only 14 million cubic meters of water, which represents 8 percent of its capacity,” said the director of the capital’s water company, Behzad Parsa, quoted by the media. IRNA news agency.
At that level, it will only be able to continue supplying water to Tehran “for two weeks,” he said.
The megacity of more than 10 million inhabitants is located on the southern slopes of the often snow-capped Alborz Mountains, which rise up to 5,600 meters and whose rivers feed multiple reservoirs.
But the country is in the midst of its worst drought in decades. The level of rainfall in Tehran province was “virtually unprecedented in a century,” a local official declared last month.
A year ago, the Amir Kabir Dam held back 86 million cubic meters of water, Parsa said, but there was a “100 percent drop in rainfall” in the Tehran region.
Parsa did not provide details about the status of the system’s other reservoirs. According to Iranian media, the population of Tehran consumes around three million cubic meters of water every day.
As a water-saving measure, it has been reported that in recent days the supply has been cut off in several neighborhoods, while cuts were frequent this summer. Two holidays were declared in July and August to save water and energy, and power outages occurred almost daily amid a heat wave.
“The water crisis is more serious than what is being discussed today,” Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned at the time.
