Dead Sea tourism hit by fears of nearing ecological disaster

By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent

All a Dead Sea visitor has to do to witness an ecological disaster is peek through the fence separating the Ein Gedi beach from its former holiday village. Eight years after a staff person fell into a sinkhole here, the place look like it has been blitzed. Huge holes litter the area, into one of which the reception office has sunken with room keys still hanging on the walls. Desiccated tamarisk trees emerge from the scorched and cracked earth and pipes, once buried, hang in mid-air.

"We used to count them, but now there are too many," says Shimon Shukrun, who has lived and worked here since the 1960s. "It was a garden of Eden, now it's ruined."

The place is a popular stop for politicians touring the area, where one can truly appreciate the size of the disaster that has hit the Dead Sea. Shukrun begs the photographer, seeking a better shot, to be careful. He says the sink holes are bell-shaped, so one could bepeering into one while standing on a thin crust that could suddenly give way. We leave in a panic after Sh

Shukrun discovers a new hole  half-a-meter across and at least 20 meters deep.

Geologists agree that the reason accounting for the appearance of the sink holes is the drop in the Dead Sea level, combined with the flow of fresh ground water that dissolves the salt in the soil. More than 1,000 holes have appeared since the phenomenon was first identified in the mid-1990s. The Geological Survey of Israel has published a map of risk areas for sink holes that includes the entire eastern coast of the Dead Sea, from the Qalia beach to the Masada area and including large parts of the road along the Dead Sea.

The situation is expected to worsen as the sea continues to sink.

Ein Gedi has been hit the worst. Even after the Israel National Roads Company spent millions of shekels in 2002 shoring up the road, the holes began to take bites out of it, threatening both of Kibbutz Ein Gedi's enterprises, the beach concession and the date plantation.

"We'll make a living in the end, but what lies ahead? We have a global resource and we are destroying it," says Kibbutz spokesperson Merav Ayalon.

Further south is the Ein Gedi Hot Springs spa which, when it was built in 1984, was only a few meters from the water's edge. Today, it is two kilometers away. "They told us not to build too close to the water, because in a few years the Med-Dead canal would be finished and the water level would rise," Merav says cynically. Swimmers catch a shuttle down to the shore comprised of prickly, salt-and-mud flats. Every few years another section of path is paved for the shuttle. "Pretty soon we'll need a visa to get into the water," Ayalon says, referring to the fact that the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan lies on the otherside of the lake.


Ten minutes' drive further south, the Dead Sea turns into a narrow channel leading water from what has become its northern lake to the evaporation pools of the potash production facility, the Dead Sea Works  all that is left of the southern portion of the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea's posh resort hotels are built along the largest of the pools serving the facility Pool 5. The level of the pool has been rising 20 centimeters every year as salt sinks to the bottom, and the biggest concern is that the water will rise so high it will flood the hotel's foundations and cause them to collapse. Regional Council engineer Avi Rotem says the area's sewage system is already folding due to flooding. He does not picture a catastrophic structural collapse, but imagines that the day will come when the buildings would become so dangerous as to be condemned.

One solution  a hugely expensive one, is to dredge up the salt. The second is to create a dam to protect the hotels. The third is to demolish the hotels, with a concomitant loss of 4,000 jobs  basically the entire tourism industry. The hotel owners have recently petitioned the
High Court to force the state to find a solution.

Geologist Danny Wacks, who has studied the phenomenon of sink holes, is not optimistic: "We foresee ecological disaster. It might end up like Gaza  we may withdraw from here in the end, too. The question is only how much more we want to suffer."

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