The Great artificial river or GREAT MAN-Made River (GMMR) in Libya it is the largest aqueduct In the world created for the water supply of a country but which, due to the events of recent years, has been completed only at 70%. The project aims to transport freshwater from the Nubian sandstone aquifer in the Sahara desert to coastal regions of Libya for domestic, agricultural and industrial use. The research in the 1950s of new oil deposits in the deserts of southern Libya led to the discovery of large quantities of fresh underground water and with the rise to the power of the regime of Gaddafi In 1969, he was the construction of what he called “eighth wonder of the world” 25 billion dollars they were spent on its realization but it is estimated that these are just the 10% Of those that would have been requested with the desalinization of the same amount of water!
The details of the project of the “Great Artificial River”
An immense project with a network carried out by the interconnection of 51,080 pipes in post-thesis concrete, each with a length of 7.5 m, a diameter of 4 m and a weight of 72 tons. Again, they are about 21,750,000 m3 the lands that have been carved to make the installation trenches and about 1 million The cubic meters of concrete used to complete the large underground network. This, in total, is long 2,820 kilometersconsists of more than 1,300 wells, most of the deeper 500 m, and was designed to ensure a capacity of 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water.
The obstacles of the Great Man-Made River
The large artificial river (Gmmr) was a water project fundamental for Libya, which began in 1989 To provide water to the densely populated coastal regions, he has faced numerous obstacles, especially starting from 2011when the civil war who interested the country interrupted the works, leaving the project incomplete to 70%. In particular, during the conflict, a key factory of pipes in Brega was destroyed from an attack NATO planeand theeconomic-political instability which followed has compromised the maintenance and development of the project. Already in 2019, many wells had been dismantled, and in 2020 a second armed attack interrupted the water supply to over 2 million people.
According to experts, the water crisis It is now a reality in Libya, the GMMR, strongly supported by Gaddafi regimehe lost his functionality already after 2011 and made the development of alternative sources for the country’s water supply urgently.
