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Gimli engineer joins sea rescue
By Jim Mosher
Sunday November 14, 2004  | Ron Coley (at left with Keith Strong, a partner in Strong-Coley Associates, a Gimli-based environmnetal consulting firm) now lives in Gimli. As a former chief engineer with Ducks Unlimited he’s been involved in a dozen international missions in which he’s shared his knowledge of water management best practices.
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Interlake Spectator — A shrinking sea a world away serves as a warning to anyone who would ignore the impacts of man’s attempts to change the landscape.
Ron Coley, a retired chief engineer with Ducks Unlimited now living in Gimli, is part of an international irrigation team. He recently returned from a trip to Moscow.
Front-and-centre at the meeting in Russia’s capital was the fate of the Aral Sea in Central Asia.
The Aral Sea has lost half its volume in just 40 years -- in the main due to irrigation systems drawing off water from the two main rivers feeding the sea. That dismally-managed draw-off has had a devastating effect on a once-thriving fishing industry and created a domino-effect of consequences no one anticipated.
“Unfortunately, they didn’t anticipate the impacts on the Aral Sea,” Coley said during a recent interview. “They basically took every drop of water out of these rivers to feed the irrigation system. It’s affected the economy; it’s affected wetlands. And it’s also affected human health.”
A huge five-nation area of the former Russian republic is just now trying to come to terms with a runaway ecological nightmare the seeds of which were sown almost a century ago.
The Central Asia nations of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgizstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan are a ring of countries east of the Caspian Sea. These nations rely on irrigation water pumped from the two main rivers flowing into the Aral Sea, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya.
Irrigation systems bleed off huge amounts of water for cotton crops. But there’s precious little management of the precious resource. The result has been that the Aral Sea, starved of natural in-flows, has lost half its surface area in just 40 years.
Fishing villages that once rimmed the coast of the Aral Sea, now sit 30 km distant from the shore -- coastal villages without a coast.
During a mid-1990s trip to the troubled sea, Coley stood at the once-shoreline. “There were fishing boats on their side,” he set of the rotting relics, silhouetted in the dusk, framed by a shore on the distant horizon.
As part of a team of international water and engineering experts, Coley returned in early September to Russia, this time to Moscow for a meeting of the International Congress on Irrigation and Drainage. Among the matters on the agenda was the future of the Aral Sea.
Coley believes the Aral Sea can be saved, though returning it to its former health will take decades.
“These five nations are faced with a gigantic problem,” he said. “It’s a problem that took 30-40 years to create. Now it’s going to take 30-40 years to correct.”
He believes Canada has a role to play. He notes that Canadian experts, government agencies and engineering firms, can even benefit from the economic and cultural opportunities that are involved in the mammoth reclamation.
Irrigation districts, fashioned perhaps after comparable entities used to manage water in Canada, and the introduction of user fees for water are among the first priorities, says Coley.
“As it is now, there is no incentive to manage water,” he said.
Crop diversification is also key. He notes that cotton, the preferred crop, draws heavily on water. “There are other crops that don’t have as high a water demand,” he said.
In addition, the region will have to develop a plan to invest millions of dollars in improving aging irrigation infrastructure.
All of which will require “major funding” from such organizations as the World Bank, the Canadian International Development Agency, the U.S. and the European Union.
Coley would also like Canada to underwrite a Canadian tour for water managers from the affected Central Asia region.
“It’s not beyond solution. The money can be there,” said Coley. “But it’s not about throwing money at the problem; there has to be a plan.”
While there is no dreict connection between the Aral Sea and Lake Winnipeg, Coley believes there are lessons to be learned.
“Lake Winnipeg is not disappearing in volume, but it is reducing in quality,” Coley said. “We don’t have the same problem faced by the nations of the Aral Sea, but there is a lesson to be learned from their experience.”
We cannot, he says, take anything for granted. We must be mindful of what we do -- because our actions, as water managers, as stewards, have sometimes unimagined impacts.
A sea a world a way is just a latest example. |
