I read an article recently that made my hair stand on end.

The article stated that a human being can survive for a month with no food, but can only live for ten days with nothing to drink.

This got me thinking about our situation here in Saudi Arabia.

This country is the foremost in the world in producing fresh water from seawater.

Since the sixties numerous plants have been built by the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC), a government agency dedicated to this task.

Over twenty plants now produce two million cubic meters of fresh water a day; in addition, they produce about 4,000 megawatts of electricity.

Without this reliable, plentiful and relatively economic source of fresh water no growth or development on the scale seen in this country would have been possible.

In terms of population alone we have grown from three million in the 1960s to an estimated twenty million people with a further six million annual visitors.

Furthermore, the great development and expansion in our agriculture would have been impossible. Available water resources would have been diverted to drinking instead. Similarly industrial development on the scale we see today would have remained a pipe dream.

In short, water is life and in Saudi Arabia water is desalinization plants; therefore desalinization plants are life for us.

I began to think what would happen, God forbid, should anything untoward occur such as a military attack by one of our enemies on these plants or some of them. They are all on our sea coasts and exposed to attack by air or sea.

I believe the threat of a military attack is more dangerous than a terrorist attack because a military strike will be far more effective and damaging and will affect more than one plant at a time.

Such a strike would result in tens of thousands of people dying within a space of a few days rather than weeks.

The resultant loss of water and electricity could also lead to massive panic and rioting which would lead to a breakdown of law and order and a catastrophic collapse of civil society. The damage would reach far beyond the area affected by the attack as there would be millions of refugees fleeing into other areas overwhelming emergency services in those areas and causing untold havoc there as well.

It is almost akin to have a nuclear attack on one of our cities.

Actually, I believe the damage would be far worse.

I have some suggestions to help address this issue I would like to tell you:

• We should avoid concentration of new plants in one area, we should spread them out.

• Build two or more small plants instead of a single big one increasing the difficulty of knocking out large production capacity in one single attack.

• Build a national water grid connecting all plants together to facilitate load sharing among different regions.

• Establish a local industrial base for spare parts and other needs of this industry to enable the quick and local repair of any damaged plant no matter how serious the damage.

These are just some of the ideas that occurred to me that I thought to scare, I mean, share with you in this New Year.