Snow brings little reprieve to capital’s water shortage

Kabul can survive without gold, but it cannot survive without snow - or so the saying goes. Despite two days of light snowfall last week, the precious resource has proven scarce this year, leaving city officials worried about the Afghan capital’s dwindling water supply.

"This isn’t enough," Abdy Delbar, an adviser to the Ministry of Public Works told IRIN on Saturday. "Snow is the most important resource for water we have in this city. Without it we simply won’t have the capacity to cope," he warned.

Equally worrying is that meteorologists are less than optimistic about future precipitation. While residents awoke on Friday to a blanket of snow, leaving the country’s largest city pristine white, by midday on Saturday most of it had melted away.

"We used to get one metre of snow from a storm, now we get between five to 10 cm if we are lucky," Delbar said. In a city 2,400 metres above sea level, a disturbing development indeed. Exacerbating the problem further is that the country is still reeling from over three years of drought. "The water levels of the deep wells in the city have dropped significantly," he explained.

Although there are nine reservoirs of varying capacity serving the city, the water level in most of them is dangerously low. The city requires 80,000 cubic metres of water a day, but presently can provide only 20,000. In short, 70 percent of Kabul’s two million plus population are without regular water access.

"We only get water between nine and one o’clock each day," 29 year-old Qader Niazi told IRIN, one of the lucky few with regular access. "Lately it has become even more erratic, given the electric cutoffs being experienced in the city," he said.

Decades of fighting have left much of the water system’s infrastructure badly damaged or destroyed. But with financial and technical assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the British NGO Oxfam, the greater part of the city’s five water supply projects has been rehabilitated.

However, two of these facilities - the Lager and the Allauddin projects - have proved inoperable due to electricity problems. Both facilities are dependent on fuel-powered generators to operate the pumps, a cost authorities cannot afford.

According to Delbar, it costs approximately US $40,000 a month to provide fuel to operate the 14 pumps at Lager, and another US $20,000 for the six pumps at Allauddin. "We simply don’t have the money," he said, adding it would be more cost-effective long-term to electrify the facilities properly, but the cost of that would be some US $300,000.

Asked how city residents were coping, Delbar said many people actually had wells in their houses, but they too were drying up. Looking up the snowcapped Hindu Kush mountains surrounding the city, the irony of such a sight could not be ignored. "If only we could bring some of that down here," he said dejectedly.