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Casablanca – Al Massira, Morocco’s second largest dam after Al-Wahda, and the beating heart of the Oum Er-Rbia River, is currently registering its lowest filling rate since its construction in 1976, at barely 5.6%.
With a storage capacity of more than 2.65 billion cubic meters and a height of around 80 meters, the Al Massira dam does not only provide drinking water to Casablanca-Settat, El Jadida, Safi, Sidi Bennour, Azemour, and Bengueri; it also provides water for industrial uses to the OCP Group in the Jorf Lasfar region.
In addition, the dam also offers irrigation water to the whole Doukkala region, the heart of Moroccan agriculture, and contributes to the production of hydroelectricity.
The Oum Er-Rbia basin, with its 11 dams in total, has been the most severely hit by Morocco’s scarcity of water supplies and drought.
“These 11 dams can store up to 5 billion cubic meters, but the actual filling rate does not exceed 7.6% currently, or 372 million cubic meters, against 18.5% at the same time last year,” Adil Mahfoud, who is in charge of water resources management at the Agency of the Oum Er-Rbia basin, told the Moroccan news outlet Le360.
“The arrivals in east water on this basin are the lowest in 80 years and we record this deficit for the fourth consecutive year,” he added, noting that this situation is due to climate change, which portends additional years of starvation.
Read also: Siltation Causes Moroccan Dams to Lose 70 Million Cubic Meters of Water
Faced with this issue, the Agency of the Oum Er-Rbia basin is taking action. According to Mahfoud, several emergency steps have already been implemented to reverse the current, gloomy trend of the below-par filling rate.
Among these measures is the transfer of 80 million cubic meters of water from the Bin El Ouidane Dam to Al Massira, which will assure the continued supply of drinking water in the aforementioned locations.
The water connection of the Bouregreg basin, in the Rabat region, to Casablanca is also proceeding. This is in parallel to the acceleration of the building of seawater desalination facilities in Casablanca and Safi, as well as the monitoring and repression of illicit water transfers from the Oum Er-Rbia basin.
Three tenders have also been issued for the construction of 120 wells for groundwater investigation.
