Amira El-Nakeeb follows the tragic saga of a lake destroyed On the shore of Lake Maryut in Alexandria, haj Ramadan stood staring at the fishing boats in dock, looking lost. Aged 65, with nine children to feed, he has fished Lake Maryut for as long as he remembers, but in the last few years the returns have been steadily dwindling. Making LE10 a day, he says, he is sometimes forced to seek work in Aswan. Rubbish disposal and landfill have transformed the lake beyond recognition. According to Gihan Zaalouk, director of the Alexandria-based NGO Friends of the Environment, neglect and pollution have silenced even the lake's desperate cries for help, with the water showing nothing but a lifeless stillness. Tareq El-Quiy, head of the Alexandria Municipal Council, concedes that, despite the council's opposition to disposing of waste matter in the lake, at LE2 billion the only available alternative to it -- an annual filtration process -- is too costly. Joined by 1,500 fishermen, the aforementioned NGO filed a suit against the governorate in 2003, obtaining an administrative court verdict that all decisions permitting disposal of waste in the lake should be annulled. Yet, as Ahmed Shabara, the Mubarak City Centre for Applied Technology (MUCSAT), indicates, both waste disposal and filling up the lake to be sold as land continue: "if you compare the water of the Nubaryia Canal before and after the Petrochemical and Ameria Textile factories started operating it becomes obvious what waste disposal has done. Yet engineer Mohsen El-Diwani, director-general of the Egyptian Environmental Affairs Agency (EEAA), Alexandria branch, argues that one of six basins in the lake remains perfectly clean, pointing out that no more than five companies violate the law, and that EEAA is suing with a view to closing them down for it. Yet neither this nor the fact that companies have started treating their waste before disposing of it, by order of the Ministry of Environment, has evidenced improvement in the life of fishermen, who complain that it's been four years since the lake yielded enough fish, that their children have only plastic rubbish to play with; even the local carpenter says he now makes boats for use in Fayoum, Luxor and Aswan. According to some, indeed, the pollution is undermining health. One fisherman removed his socks to display chipped toes: "this is what the poison in the lake is doing to our bodies." And though El-Quiy showed concern -- even a single complaint, he said, would immediately have resulted in drawing up a committee from agricultural and health authorities -- nothing is being done. And health notwithstanding, landfill has reduced the size of the lake from 50,000 to 15,000 feddans. Shabara explained that, in the absence of government surveillance, the Gharbiya El-Bahariya and Abu Azam basins were being filled up even as we spoke. El-Quiy insists that a project to fill up 3,000 feddans for General Authority on Construction and Agricultural Development to undertake a petrochemical project -- the result of former agriculture minister Youssef Wali's decree no 124 for 2001 -- was halted. Yet according to Zaalouk, the General Authority for Fish Resources Development head Ezzat Awad's promise to draw up a scientific committee to submit a report on the condition of the lake to then agriculture minister Ahmed El-Leithi last November has yet to be fulfilled. Thankfully there may yet be light at the end of the tunnel, with El-Diwani announcing the Environmental Pollution Abatement Project (EPAP), launched this month in Alexandria and Qalyubia, which is funded by the World Bank and conducted under the auspices of the ministry. Targeting the factories responsible for pollution, the project aims to systematise their waste disposal as well as cleaning the lake and beautifying its shores -- not to mention improving the housing and living conditions of 75,000 people who depend on the lake and 10,000 who work on related professions. Indeed, as haj Sayed Gaber, another fisherman, put it, "if they want the lake, let them have the lake. But first provide us with alternatives."
