Egypt builds worlds largest man-made river | Hacker News Reader

Egypt builds worlds largest man-made river

constructionweekonline.com

133 pointsmanojr1387 comments

Are there any other sources that have more info on this project? This feels like a construction puff piece. Specifically:

1. A map would be nice.

2. Where is the water coming from, and how is it ensured that this water source is sustainable?

3. A general overview of Egypt's "New Delta" project, and how this is central to its goals.

Agreed - Looking forward to a B1M episode about it. I found this tweet thread [1] which has a lot of interesting information. Some maps make it appear to be connected to the Nile, while this poster continues to say it transfers "wastewater from Alexandria to western desert". Quite cool if it's all wastewater, but I suspect it must be a combination of Nile water and wastewater.

1. https://twitter.com/mahmouedgamal44/status/16332314978376622...

Map FYI

https://www.egypttoday.com/siteimages/ArticleImgs/2021/3/30/...

Seem like one of those dictator megaprojects that rarely go well and is just a source of corruption.

The California aqueduct (444 miles, 714km) would like to have a word :-).

Basically built for the same reason, the central valley of California was mostly arid but the top soil was good for agriculture. The underground aquifer was a limit on how much farming (and of what type) could be done.

There are indeed several man-made rivers longer then this so it's unclear what the editors were thinking with this headline.

The longest one that I know of is the Grand Canal in China, which begain construction approx. 1400 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Canal_(China)

Whilst it could be that the editor or author are technically wrong it’s also quite possible that they might be technically correct and were just arguing semantics here.

As far as geography/geology/hydrology goes rivers have a specific definition which the grand canal might not fit especially as one big system since afaik it extends and connects to multiple rivers and the water doesn’t flow in a single direction into a larger body of water.

Each contiguous part of the Grand Canal only flows in one direction, it would be impossible for it to work otherwise.

You do have a point though that this new river in Egypt may be the 'largest' on some other metric.

The issue isn’t direction but rather having multiple branches as a river only includes channel(s) going downstream from a single point. Without that definition a river’s length would be the length of every river connected to it.

Thus the Mississippi and Ohio river are considered different rivers even though their waters mix and both flow downstream through the same channel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_River, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_River

According to this definition then Iraq’s man-made river (Saddam’s river) is longer at 565 km. the official role of the river was to collect irrigation water from Mesopotamia fertile land all the way to the Persian Gulf, though the real reason Saddam built it was to dry the Arab Marshes as it was difficult to contain the rebels in the marshes. https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B5%D8%A8...

I thought most of that 565km distance was an existing waterway.

In English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draining_of_the_Mesopotamian_M...

I think the distinction the authors are making - correctly or not, I’m not sure, plenty of rivers don’t flow to the sea - is this artificial river flows into the sea, not into other canals or rivers.

The grand canal connects the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, for example.

Maybe it is by total volume or flow rate

I don't think a canal that's split by locks would qualify as a river that's running in one direction all the way

I don't think locks are the reason it wouldn't count. Otherwise the Thames would end at Teddington.

So you're saying these Egyptians are in de nile?

Sarcasm like this is technically against HN policy but this made my day. Thanks for the laugh.

That is not sarcasm. Not all jokes are sarcasm.

I have been to the cloak room and got your coat.

Lines like that are best kept in your Dad-a-base.

>There are indeed several man-made rivers longer then this so it's unclear what the editors were thinking with this headline.

There's one underground that's even longer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Aqueduct

Currently China is building a new project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... which I believe is larger.

This will act like a river as it does flow into the med and will create a new delta (hence the name).

Doesn't California also contain the largest earthen dam or something to that extent? It's not as impressive as the Hoover dam or the Three Gorges dam but it's still huge from what I understand.

Largest in the US at least.

Fairly recently it decided to shorten it's own spillway a bit though. Shortly afterwards it gained a whole lot of concrete.

Juan Brown has a very comprehensive series on that excitement[0]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wikin2TJ7b0&list=PL6SYmp3qb3...

An aqueduct isn’t a river. While the exact definition may seem vague the use of multiple pumping stations along the Californi aqueduct are one obvious difference.

Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dos_Amigos_Pumping_Plant, etc.

It's unclear that the river in the article is a river in the conventional sense, either: it seems to be routed underground for long stretches of tunnel at points.

(The longest tunnel in the world is also a water tunnel, and supplies NYC with water[1].)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaware_Aqueduct

Natural rivers will sometimes flow underground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_river

Libya's Great Man-Made River (1,750mi, 2,820km) [0] would like to have a few more words :-). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River

Let's nitpick then. It says: "According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2,820 kilometres (1,750 mi))[3] and aqueducts in the world.".

It could concievably have no pipe longer than 114 km.

Also if it's underground it's not a river?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subterranean_river

That's a heck of an aquifer. Libya is pumping 2.4 km^3 a year from the estimated 150,000 km^3 reserve.

The Erie Canal (362.9 mi) is not as long as the California aqueduct nor the Grand Canal in China but it is also longer than the "man made river" of the article, and IT HAS A SONG, and a good one at that.

Even the Romans (Byzantine if you wish) built the aqueduct of Valens supplying Constantinopole with fresh water over 426km so yeah I'm also not sure what is this so impressive. And anyway, if the Egyptian one stays uncovered as the pictures show it, I wonder how much water will it have left on a hot day (which are almost all) when it approaches destination.

Are there any prior examples of rehydrating the desert that have actually worked? (note: from an agricultural perspective, not as artificial oases turned into gambling destinations :-).

The question is in relation to the quality of the soil after millenia of arid conditions. The Nile valley and delta are historically fertile due to seasonal sedimentation, but that too has stopped with the Aswan High Dam [1]

[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-30216-4_...

“China's efforts to halt the Gobi provide a blueprint for tackling desertification”

https://www.unccd.int/news-stories/stories/chinas-efforts-ha...

Egypt's previous de-desertification project "Toshka" kinda of worked. It wasn't the massive job creator that it was sold as because most of the farming was very large scale and mechanized. But it was able to produce large amounts of high quality food that Egyptians rarely saw because it was more valuable for export.

Here are some photos I shot of it for The National: https://www.daviddegner.com/photography/toshka/

> Are there any prior examples of rehydrating the desert that have actually worked?

As others have noted, there are large swaths of productive agriculture land in California that were, and would continue to be, giant deserts without extensive irrigation projects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Valley

Yeah, that is true for now, but it's probably not going to work long term because of soil salinity.

Some posit that the reason for the rise and fall of the various fertile crescent civilizations was due exactly to this.

If you wanna know more about it Cadillac Desert is an excellent start.

The Loess Plateau in China comes to mind[1], gigantic scale, mostly manual labor.

1: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2007/03/15/restori...

This (and the other examples in comments) are somehow comforting, in the sense that they seem to suggest that soil processes are fairly reversible (though the effort required for achieving results in a reasonable timescale might be enormous).

> Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi recently hailed the New Delta project as the largest initiative ever undertaken in the country.

Wait a minute, how are we scoping and measuring initiatives when there’s at least one Great Pyramid plus a few others that may rank fairly high.

Is there a reason they don't just call it a canal? That seems like a perfectly serviceable English word.

While I won't check my facts, it feels likely the publication is to blame on this one. I'm pretty sure the Egyptians are not referring to it as anything in English. Meanwhile, how can a writer resist playing on "the world's largest river in Egypt"? (Okay, perhaps they should have resisted harder.)

No I don't think there's a reason. Possibly that the primary sense of a canal is to transport things and this is to transport water. But that's the other sense of the word. I blame it on the firing of copy editors. Maybe this is another thing chatgpt can save us from.

Aqueduct (noun) A pipe or channel designed to transport water from a remote source, usually by gravity.

I guess if they would have called it 'world's largest canal', it would have been more obvious that the title is not true. That honor goes to the Grand Canal in China, with a length of 1776km.

Where is the fresh water coming from?

Apparently treated agricultural wastewater. I would never have guessed that.

https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2021/04/egypt-plans-new...

Nice. Pretty impressive project if they can get it going.

With an informative link to https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2020/11/egypt-build-wor...

Visited egypt recently. This project originates from upper egypt's Lake Nasser (near Abu Simbel) which is a very large water body.

Are you sure you're talking about the same project? That contradicts the maps others have posted in this thread [1], and would also be way longer than 114km to reach the New Delta.

[1] https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/100343/10-information-t...

First of all, I believe this should be called a canal, since rivers are naturally formed and canals built.

> Spanning a length of 114 kilometers,

Even the Mittelland Canal in Germany is 326km[0], so how it it the largest 'manmade river' in the world?

0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelland_Canal

Sounds like marketing; if they call it a canal there's longer ones, if they call it a river it has its own definitions. Or something.

Being "naturally formed" isn't a requirement to be a river. Being gravity fed and naturally flowing is. A canal doesn't have significant flow.

But would you really call this concrete structure you see in the picture a river?

If the LA River is any historical precedent, yes.

If the LA River can be a river, why not?

The flow of water was there before the concrete constructions were made, I guess?

Not necessarily. It's common practice to built structure to control and redirect rivers around developments. That doesn't stop it from being a river.

This article I found by searching has a map: https://www.egypttoday.com/Article/1/100343/10-information-t...

It says the schedule got sped up from 10 years to 2 years. I wonder if the Ethiopian Dam scheduled for completion in the coming months had anything to do with that? https://www.dw.com/en/ethiopias-gerd-dam-a-potential-boon-fo...

From that EgyptToday article, written two years ago:

> it was scheduled to finish within ten years, but President Abdel Fatah al Sisi directed that it should be completed within two years

From the submitted article, written today:

> 35% of the pipe works and 65% of the open track have been completed

Any bets on when it really finishes?

Not the Qattara Depression Project [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project

> The New Delta project is the future of Egypt. It will be implemented in two years,” Sisi said in statements during his visit to the Suez Canal Authority’s Maritime Training and Simulation Center in the canal city of Ismailia

There's a LOT that Egypt does wrong that I don't want to replicate in the US. But the US could never get a project of this scale through environmental review anymore, much less in less than 20 years. Really quite disappointing seeing incompetent autocracies outperforming us at building anything larger than a semiconductor.

I mean we build slow because of "environmental reviews" and regulatory capture. You'd expect autocracies to be able to execute quicker anyway.

> we build slow because of "environmental reviews" and regulatory capture. You'd expect autocracies to be able to execute quicker anyway.

To emphasize: the Hoover Dam was authorized in 1928 and dedicated in '35 [1]. Permitting private enforcement of NEPA [2] has been a disaster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Environmental_Policy_...

Here's my favorite example: Plans for the Empire State Building announced August 29, 1929. Construction began on March 17, 1930. The building formally opened on May 1, 1931.

No computer aided drafting, no project management software. Oh, and the stock market crashed shortly after the building was announced.

To me the Empire State Building is a great example of how modern risk management introduces significant risk to a project. IMO the time taken to complete a project is frequently the most critical risk factor. The lack of computerisation and bureaucracy meant that the focus was on how to build it rather than on how to “manage” it.

But I don’t understand the problem with NEPA. Can someone explain? Protecting the environment seems, on its face, to be a good thing.

The Empire State Building had more than double the worker deaths than One World Trade. One World Trade was lambasted as being horrendous on its safety record for a modern building.

I don’t know much about this topic but having it without comparing worker safety seems like we aren’t isolating the variables well.

> EGYPT: 35% of the pipe works

The other 65% is broken!

Not a pathetic joke I just read it the wrong way!

Aka a canal? Or is there some distinction being made?

Interesting that the feddan mentioned in the article [0] is very close to the acre, another oxplow-derived unit of area.

Also, surely this won't have disastrous ecological consequences... (clueless)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feddan

Isn't China's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South%E2%80%93North_Water_Tran... is the biggest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Man-Made_River 1,600 km vs. 114 km. And elsewhere in North Africa, no less.

Come on, Egypt, do better.

Qaddafi's irrigation system in the Libyan desert was more impressive.

No map to show where this is built ??

I hope it is not another humanwish-river like prior works that ditch actual reality...

Anything to make Egypt relevent again eh?

Lacking a little relevency since the Pharohs died.

The Narmada Canal is 500+ kms.

https://twitter.com/sumitsonii/status/1645832376730390528

Kinda neat that a country that’s a successor to an ancient hydraulic empire continues to carry on that civilization’s legacy of massive hydrological projects. Also see the Aswan Dam.

"We have a large river at home"

Egypt don't know what she should do.

35%+65% = 100%

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