JEDDAH, 12 October — As much as 50 percent of the Kingdom’s drinking water is lost as a direct result of the poor maintenance of pipelines, according to Dr. Hamoud ibn Matar Al-Thubaity, a professor specializing in this area.
“The state spends millions of riyals in distributing water to citizens, but half of the water never gets to them because of leakages,” Thubaity said while giving a lecture at the Makkah Cultural Club.
The Makkah region requires 1.59 million cubic meters of water daily, and there is presently a deficit of 43 percent. Thubaity stressed the importance of carrying out studies on the volume of groundwater in the Kingdom and the country’s general water requirements.
“We need an emergency plan for our water,” Al-Madinah daily quotes the professor as saying, adding that he has called for a reduction in the cultivation of crops that require large amounts of water for irrigation.
According to the professor, careful disposal of hospital garbage and other chemicals must be made a priority in order to avoid water pollution, and he urged the authorities to facilitate investment in the sector.
Agriculture consumes 12 billion cubic meters of water annually, while the population uses 1.55 billion cubic meters for drinking. About 1.02 billion cubic meters of water is used by the industrial and mineral sectors.
